“We just started locking in defensively, really locking back into our game plan,” Shackelford said. “We settled in and were taking better shots, not as many contested shots in the second half, sharing the ball a little bit more.”
Springboro (9-3, 5-2 Greater Western Ohio Conference) has been at or near the top of the league for the past several years. Wayne (7-5, 4-3) has been rebuilding since the 2020-21 team led by Bree Hall and coached by Travis Trice lost in the regional final.
“Just a different type of hungry,” said Wayne’s new star, sophomore point guard Na’Riya Goddard. “They’ve beat us for like five years straight, and they thought they could beat us. We were the bigger dog.”
Not because the Warriors have height. Most of the time the five on the floor are 5-foot-7 or under. The tallest Warrior who played is 5-9 Nadia Strodes. The team’s leading scorers – Goddard, Makenna Pride, Dezirae Thomas – are 5-5 to 5-7.
The Warriors, though, were the dog with the most fight, hounding Springboro with their defense, a defense that was porous in the first quarter and foul-prone. The Panthers built a 16-6 lead on 13-of-16 free-throw shooting. Then the shorter Warriors played the way they must.
“Playing fast and rebounding the best we can,” Shackelford said. “We try to defend, play fast, keep people out of the paint. All five got to box out and rebound and just play together.”
And knocking down 3-pointers at clutch times helps, too. Goddard, who scored a game-high 19 points, put the Warriors up for good at 33-32 with a minute left in the third quarter.
Pride, the Warriors’ best 3-point shooter, made the game’s two biggest shots in the first minute of the third quarter. She hit consecutive 3-pointers in transition to push Wayne’s lead 40-32. She made three threes and scored 12 points. Thomas, who scored 18, made four 3-pointers for the third time this season.
“Those were huge,” Goddard said of Pride’s back-to-back threes. “Just excitement. But I feel like defense was a huge part of the game as well. We got a few stops back to back, which helped us on the offensive side.”
Wayne maintained its lead, and by the time Springboro cut it to 51-49 on McKenzie Jones’ 3-pointer with 29 seconds left, it was too late. Thomas and Goddard made two free throws apiece, and the Warriors didn’t allow the Panthers another good shot.
As the game unraveled for the Panthers, Springboro coach Mike Holweger wasn’t seeing his team play with the feistiness and fight he had seen from them all season.
“Clearly, Wayne had more energy than we did,” he said. “They played with more urgency, and they were the much, much, much tougher team tonight. And so that’s on me. I got to figure out how to fix that. But give Wayne a lot of credit. They just brought more energy and toughness, and that usually results in pretty good stuff.”
Holweger guided the Panthers to the Division I state final two seasons ago and the regional final last year with Bryn Martin, now at Ohio State, Aniya Trent, now at Virginia Tech, and many others leading those teams.
This year’s team is different with Jones, Ady Martin (Bryn’s sister) and Leah Wilhite doing most of the scoring. Against Wayne, Jones had 17, Martin 12 and Wilhite 11.
“What we have to understand is that our recipe is we have to always play with tremendous energy with no dips,” Holweger said. “We’ve had too many dips our last six quarters. So hopefully we learn from it.”
The game started to get away from the Panthers in the second quarter. Martin made a 3-pointer for a 19-10 lead, but Wayne finished the half on a 10-2 run to slice the Panthers’ lead to 21-20.
“Second quarter, I thought we decided we were going to go play one on one,” Holweger said. “I thought we were extremely − to an extreme − selfish in the second quarter. It’s uncharacteristic of that group. That’s not how we can play and be successful. That’s where it started.“
And that’s when the underdog became the big dog.
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