SACRAMENTO – It has been said a zillion times that basketball is a game of runs.
Mater Dei’s girls basketball team made a large run to take a 17-point lead in the fourth quarter. Vanden of Fairfield made a larger, and more important, run from there.
Vanden scored 23 of the game’s final 26 points to beat the Monarchs, 64-61, Saturday in the CIF State Division II championship game at Golden 1 Center.
Mater Dei 6-foot-1 senior forward Cyndi Lewis, who signed with San Jose State, scored a game-high 23 points with 12 rebounds. Duke-signed senior Jayda Adams scored 19 points. Vanden’s Julia Blackshell-Fair scored 20 points with 21 rebounds.
Mater Dei coach Kevin Kiernan has seen a lot in his more than 900 games as a high school basketball coach, including 11 seasons with the Monarchs.
Kiernan has experienced a career’s worth of triumphs and travails in just this season alone.
“I’ve never seen a year like this,” Kiernan said. “I’d say six of our losses were like this. We’d have a lead, we’d give it up and let the other team back in the game, the other team would make a big 3 and, boom, heartbreak.”
Mater Dei finished with a 24-9 record. The Monarchs won the championship of the Trinity League, which included this season’s CIF State Division II champion Rosary, with an 8-0 league record. They were sent to the CIF-Southern Section Open Division in which they went 0-2.
All CIF-SS Open Division teams received guaranteed entry into the state tournament. Mater Dei was 4-0 in the CIF Southern California Regionals, including a 50-39 win over Orangewood Academy in the Southern California Division II championship game to advance to the CIF State Championships.
Vanden (31-5) ended the season with a 24-game winning steak.
Mater Dei is 4-3 in state championship games. The Monarchs’ most-recent state championship was in the 2011-12 season. Their four state titles is the second-most in Orange County history, behind Brea Olinda’s state-record 10 state titles.
The Monarchs outscored the Vikings, 25-9, in the third quarter to take a 55-38 lead into the fourth quarter.
When Adams made a 3-pointer early in the final quarter, the Monarchs’ lead again went to 17 points, 58-41.
Vanden’s Deirdre Huff made a 3 and it was 58-44. On Mater Dei’s following possession, Adams missed a driving layup and felt the miss was because she was fouled. She said so, and her complaint drew a technical foul.
“That didn’t help,” Kiernan said. “It added to the long list of things that weren’t working.”
Vanden made the technical foul shots and scored on the rewarded possession. The momentum belonged to the Vikings at that point.
They outscored the Monarchs, 23-3, to overcome Mater Dei’s 17-point lead. Vanden outscored Mater Dei, 25-6, in the quarter.
Other runs and momentum shifts were prevalent from the opening tip. The Monarchs had a shaky start.
Mater Dei turned the ball over on its first three possessions. The Monarchs fell behind, 6-0. They came back to take a 7-6 lead. Vanden outscored Mater Dei, 9-2, the rest of the first quarter and took a 15-9 advantage into the second quarter.
The Monarchs struggled again through most of the second quarter. They trailed by eight points, 29-21. Then came another Mater Dei run, as the Monarchs scored the second quarter’s final nine points.
Despite their 11 first-half turnovers, they had a 30-29 lead at halftime.
Mater Dei’s great third quarter seemed to put the Monarchs in position to cruise to victory. But momentum changed into a Vanden uniform in the fourth quarter.
Kiernan said Mater Dei played its best this season in the two CIF-SS Open Division losses, a one-point loss to Harvard-Westlake of Studio City and an overtime loss to Windward of Los Angeles. The Monarchs then played well enough in the regionals to get to the state final. So he’d seen his players rebound from a tough loss, and figured they could do so again, if given the chance.
“If we had a game tomorrow,” Kiernan said, “we’d probably play really well.”
Contact the writer: sfryer@scng.com
