HARTLAND — As a prognosticator, Abby Ratkowiak had an idea, even if her prediction was off.
She told Lexey Tobel she thought Tobel would have a good night in Monday’s Lakes Conference championship game against Howell.
“She said, ‘Lexey, I know you’re going to drop 40 tonight,'” Tobel said. “I told her I would do my best.”
It turned out to be more than enough.
Tobel hit on eight of her nine shots from beyond the arc, matching the Howell team totla in a 49-24 rout at Hartland High School.
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“(Ratkowiak) came up to me and said, ‘I think I should predict your future in every game,'” Tobel said, laughing.
The Eagles (18-1) will play Wayne Memorial for the KLAA championship at Wayne on Thursday after the Zebras beat Novi 55-38 for the Kensington Conference title.
For the Highlanders (16-3), it was a stunning step backward
“I truly thought we would give a better performance than we did,” Howell coach Tim Olszewski said. “But the fact is, they’ve got a lot of length, they’ve got playmakers and they’ve got a lot of weapons. On top of all the great things they did, we did not execute offensively, and those things add up.”
The Eagles got going early, taking a 17-7 lead, thanks to six points each from Tobel from the outside and Whitney Sollom inside.
On defense, Hartland’s Michelle Moraitis followed Howell point guard (and leading scorer) Lexie Miller all over the floor, limiting her to four points.
“We ran Lexie off double screens, triple screens,” Olszewski said. “But they did a great job of covering that up. They made a conscious decision to keep the ball out of her hands or make it difficult to score. We tried to do the exact same thing to their players, (but) it didn’t work out as well as their plan did.”
Tobel, meanwhile, hoisted up 3s with all the confidence in the world, and it was rewarded, over and over gain.
“I don’t think I’ve ever made so many 3s in a game in my life,” she said. ‘During warmups I was feeling pretty good and took advantage of that.”
Meanwhile, the Highlanders were out of sync with Miller covered so closely.
“We never let them get a hot hand,” Tobel said. “In the third, they got a few layups (early), but we always stuck together. They started to butt heads out there on the court, and hearing them butt heads helped us realize we can break them and keep playing.”
Olszewski, for his part, was at his wit’s end trying to shake his team out of an offensive torpor.
“I burned three timeouts in a minute in a half just to say, ‘Why are we not shooting the ball?’ ‘Why are we not attacking?'” he said. “When you’re at this level and the defender is six feet away, you need to pull that trigger. You don’t need to make three or four extra passes, because you’ve got a good look. Tonight we were very passive, and that’s not what we talk about.”
Asked when she felt her team had the game wrapped up, Moraitis sounded like a coach.
“Not until the last three minutes,” she said. “I kept at it until the end, and you never know what a decent team can do to you.”
Sollom added 14 points for the Eagles, while Leah Weslock had nine to lead the Highlanders.
“Players make plays, and (Tobel) shot well,” Olszewski said. “They hit three 3s in a row and we miss three, and the next thing you know, a six-point game is 12, 15, 20 — Bam! The snowball’s at the bottom. So we have to get better.”
