During the Bruins’ three-year run of unprecedented excellence and three consecutive state titles, many regular season games have appeared to be nothing but formalities. The once-tense rivalry with Hickman had become rather one-sided. However, the Kewpies’ 45-35 win over RBHS Wednesday changed that narrative.
Heading into the games, the No. 1 Bruins (13-5) appeared to be favored over the No. 4 Kewpies (17-2), even at Hickman. Kewpie Head Coach Tonya Mirts and her team didn’t buy into the hype surrounding RBHS, though.
“We expected to be in this position,” Mirts said. “I think this year of any year they don’t have six kids that are over 6’1”. They had a couple that we were really worried about.”
Although RBHS guard Sophie Cunningham, who learned just hours before tip-off that she’d been named to the McDonalds All-American Team, was the biggest name before the game, she wasn’t the one lighting up the scoreboard.
Hickman forward Emily Miller, one of only three seniors on her team, went off for 26 points – 57 percent of her team’s total. She was on fire throughout the game and came up clutch in the fourth quarter by making almost all her free throws to ice the game. She said the Kewpies’ key to success was not getting caught up in the scale of the matchup.
“It feels awesome. It feels great, wonderful, all of those things,” Miller said. “We just fought really hard that entire game. It went by really quick actually because we were just in it. It’s a great feeling. At halftime we were like, ‘Okay, we did that one half. We can do another half. I think we try to just take it one quarter at a time.’ We looked at the third quarter and we were like, ‘We’re going to win this quarter whether it’s just by two points or not.’”
The Kewpies’ defense stifled the Bruins’ offense the whole night, which Mirts attributed to a new scheme they ran to stop Cunningham.
“We have a tremendous athlete in Mikayla Logan,” Mirts said. “Kelsey [Mirts] was too small to handle [Cunningham] and usually she’s our defensive expert. Mikayla came away from the basket and dealt with her which forced us to put a smaller person on 42. They have two huge post [players] in there, so you take your best post defender, take her away from the basket and handle another kid, I just think our kids made really good adjustments in doing that.”
Cunningham’s ears were also often filled with chants of “Emily’s better” from Hickman’s student section. She got into foul trouble early and fouled out with 1:03 to play with 16 points.
“This just wasn’t our game,” Cunningham said. “They outworked us and you know what? We’re going to fix it. I think this is the best thing – don’t get me wrong, it kills me to lose to them, but … it is what it is. This could be the best thing that happened to us because we’re going to work extremely hard in practice from here on out. We’re not going to have that feeling again.”
RBHS head coach Jill Nagel echoed Cunningham’s words about being outworked, saying the Bruins have to play harder. Mirts was also impressed by the Bruins in general, saying that “you can’t play against any better basketball [team] in the state of Missouri.”
After most of the fans that had packed Hickman’s gym wandered back to their cars, the mood of both teams seemed subdued. That metaphorical grain of salt that the Bruins and Kewpies took the game with was probably the knowledge that with both teams playing in the same district, a postseason matchup is very likely.
“It’s a loss. I’m honestly not too worried about it,” Cunningham said. “You know, hopefully we’ll have another chance down the road.”
By Brett Stover