His team was ready for the challenge.
Bellbrook controlled the action, frustrated Waynesville throughout the night, and prevailed 61-30 Thursday to close the regular season for both teams.
“We went into it knowing that it was going to be a huge game,” Bellbrook sophomore Libby Bunsold said. “And we knew that Waynesville was going to come out with energy wanting to beat us, so we just knew we had to retaliate with that and that’s exactly what we did.”
Credit: Steven Wright
Credit: Steven Wright
The 2025-26 season is the third consecutive that Bellbrook (Southwestern) and Waynesville (Buckeye) are the outright division champions in the SWBL. The two sides had split the previous two meetings.
Those games were much closer than Thursday night’s contest.
The Golden Eagles got past an early spurt by the Spartans and clamped their foot to the gas pedal afterward.
Bunsold exploded in the second quarter. A personal 8-0 run built Bellbrook’s lead into double digits where it remained for good. She scored 23 points on the night and went nine-for-nine at the free throw line — the only Golden Eagles player to shoot from the charity stripe.
Her spark got the rest of her teammates going. Senior Ainsley Gregory hit a shot at the buzzer to close the first half and parlayed it with a pair of threes to start the third quarter on her way to scoring a season-high 13 points.
Second leading scorer, junior Lauren Fabrick, wasn’t needed to score until late when she added nine points in the fourth. She had 12 points on the night, and senior Zoe Howard added 10 to make it four Bellbrook (20-2, 10-0) players in double figures.
“It was our last home game,” Bunsold said. “Gave it our all on offense and defense, it was great. I mean, every single person on the floor worked their butts off. That’s all you can ask.”
Waynesville (16-6, 13-1) was held to 11 points in the middle quarters. Even though senior guards Katie Berrey and Maggie Stephenson handled the full court pressure applied by Bellbrook better than most, the half court man-to-man defense rarely allowed easy looks around the basket.
Credit: Steven Wright
Credit: Steven Wright
“We needed to get used to some higher pressure play, some faster play, especially get some games coming at the end of the season where everything was a bit slower and we had moments where we adapted and we had moments where we panicked,” Waynesville head coach Kelley Bricker said.
Junior Kloe Frankenberg led the Spartans with 10 points. Berrey and Stephenson, both of whom have reached the 1,000-point mark in their careers, combined to be held to a season-low 11 points on Thursday.
Bellbrook has reached at least 20 wins in eight of the last 11 seasons. Their only losses came in back-to-back games in late December on the road against Wayne by one and Mount Notre Dame, the state’s top ranked team regardless of division by MaxPreps, by four.
“Sometimes you don’t want to go undefeated, even though you always want to go undefeated, but sometimes a loss or two just get you to understand when we’re going through some tough times and got to fight through it and the girls come out on the other thing. I think with this schedule we had to go, 20-2 is pretty impressive.”
Bellbrook earned the top-seed in the Southwest District Division III draw, and Waynesville did the same in D-V.
Bellbrook will face Tecumseh, the 16-seed, at 7 p.m. on Monday in Springfield to open the D-III tournament. Waynesville plays 9-seed Shawnee at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday in Trotwood in the second round of the D-V tournament.
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