Laurel Gators Take Down Gilmour Academy, 51-38

Because of the otherworldly talent of sophomore Saniyah Hall, there is a tendency to look at the Laurel School girls basketball team as a one-woman show.

As one of the top 10^th graders in the country, Hall certainly is the straw that stirs the Gators’ drink. But in Laurel’s Division II regional semifinal at Barberton High School Tuesday, several of Laurel’s other players made major contributions, helping the Gators take down Gilmour Academy, 51-38. Laurel next faces Streetsboro in a regional final at 7 p.m. Friday. The Rockets pulled a major upset in the other semifinal, edging Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary, 45-42.

Clearly, everything revolves around Hall. She’s simply too good for it to be otherwise. Against Gilmour she had 20 points, 14 rebounds, eight assists and four steals. But sophomore Tristan Williams added 11 points and freshman point guard Nyla Edwards contributed eight points and demonstrated excellent ballhandling skills while battling Gilmour’s pressure defense. Using a rotation that employs all 9^th and 10^th graders, Laurel played eight players and seven of them scored.

“It’s great to see the young kids contributing, but the scary part is they’re just scratching the surface,” said Laurel coach Terrina Robinson. “We had seven people in the scorebook tonight, which is good for us. I think we’ve been doing a consistent job of that in the past six or seven games. It’s something we’ve really tried to focus on, especially since we’ve been seeing triangle-and-two with two people on Saniyah. The best thing about Saniyah is that she is encouraging her teammates to step up.”

Perhaps most telling is that Hall didn’t need to carry the entire team on her back, especially in the fourth quarter. She scored her final points with 4 minutes, 39 seconds left to play to give her team a 42-32 lead. Then, it was up to Edwards to hit 5 of 6 free throws down the stretch and for Liv Schneider and Chloe Johnson to hit layups off of feeds from Hall, who was surrounded by multiple Gilmour defenders.

“You try to limit her, but it felt like she had 20-something,” said Gilmour coach Kevin Byrne. “She finds a way to score points and get her teammates involved.”

The entire Laurel rotation also plays excellent defense, as Gilmour struggled to score the entire game. The Lancers, who bow out at 20-6, scored 20 points in the first half and just 18 in the second, including a stretch of more than 5 scoreless minutes in the final period that sealed their fate.

When Helen Holley came out and scored six quick points to open the third quarter and tie the game at 26, it appeared the game would be a dogfight for the rest of the way. But the Gators answered with a 7-0 run of their own, including a 3-pointer by Jordyn Meyer, and the Lancers never got closer than six the rest of the way.

“When we made the little run to start the third quarter, I thought we might be in business when we got it from six to zero, but then they got it right back out to seven,” Byrne said. “We were just kind of looking for that big shot all night and we were never quite able to cash it in. We just weren’t able to score quite enough points to beat them. We needed to find a way to score more points, and we just weren’t able to do it.”

In fact, after forging the 26-26 tie, Gilmour was outscored the rest of the way, 25-12.

“We knew they would come out strong in the third quarter,” Robinson said. “We knew they had seven seniors who weren’t going to lay down. We just had to withstand their runs. Our defensive rotations were a little bit slower today than they have been in the past, so that’s something we’ve got to go back and go over. But kudos to our kids, because they never stopped fighting. They really dug deep. I thought we did a good job of trying to keep control and trying to stay in control.”

Holley, who played at Laurel for two years before transferring to Gilmour, led her team with 19 points. Katie Puletti added seven points, and Elaina Kline-Ruminski had five.

“They played a little better than we did,” said Byrne. “It wasn’t that we didn’t try hard enough or that we didn’t want it enough. They just were able to make a couple more plays than we did.”

Laurel, which upped its record to 17-10, is hoping to make its second appearance in the state final four in program history, with the other coming in 2021.

“We’re not done yet,” said Robinson. “We’re still building, still getting better. We’re not satisfied with where we are, but I like how we’re piecing things together.”