LYNN — Late into the third quarter of Saturday night’s Bishop Fenwick-St. Mary’s girls basketball game, the Spartans grabbed a 10-point lead, which is sustained through the end of the period.
Once the fourth quarter started, though, you’d have been hard-pressed to figure out which team had the lead and which one was trying to catch up.
Bishop Fenwick became the aggressor while the Spartans tried to hit from the outside. That spelled the difference as the Crusaders overtook the top-seeded Spartans in the waning minutes of the game, 55-52, by going to the hoop and hitting their free throws.
Fenwick’s win puts the Crusaders into the Division 3 North semifinals, where they’ll play No. 3 Stoneham at a site and time to be announced.
Fenwick may have finished with an 11-9 record over the regular season, but the Crusaders played most of it without junior captain Jaxson Nadeau and senior sparkplug Fredi DeGuglielmo.
And it was DeGuglielmo who lit off the spark that got Fenwick going, scoring acrobatic basket after acrobatic basket en route to an 11-point performance. Most of those points were in the first half, as the spearheaded the Crusaders to a halftime lead of 29-25.
“Fredi loves big games,” said Crusader coach Adam DeBaggis. “I’ve had her for four years, and she’s a real spark plug.”
While DeGuglielmo was lighting it up to the delight of the Crusader crowd, other Crusaders stepped up too. Sammi Gallant led the team in scoring with 16 points, Olivia DiPietro had 10, and while Jennie Meagher had 8, her work under the boards, especially in keeping St. Mary’s Olivia Nazaire in check, was one of the keys to the Crusaders’ win. Nazaire had 16 points, but she worked for every one of them, often taking on two or three Crusaders as she went into her arsenal of low-post moves.
DeBaggis also said that the Crusaders did a great job containing Pam Gonzalez, the Spartans’ other big gun. Gonzalez finished with 18 points, nine of them coming from 3-pointers, and scored the Spartans’ only point, on a foul shot, in the last five minutes as both defenses put the clamps on each other.
St. Mary’s had a 51-41 lead early in the fourth quarter before it all unraveled.
“We made too many mistakes,” said Spartan coach Jeff Newhall. “We turned the ball over, had two traveling calls with no one around, just mistakes you can’t make,” he said.
“Give Fenwick credit,” Newhall said. “They drove to the hoop, drew fouls, and made the shots while we were out there taking 3-pointers.”
With 3:33 to go, Gonzalez hit one of two foul shots and the lead, into which Fenwick had already cut, was 52-46. From that point on, Fenwick scored nine straight points, five of them on free throws.
