Lady Bruins win playoff opener

Baldwin ran through the regular season with 16 wins in 17 games and racked up a perfect 14-0 mark in Conference AA-II games.

That success continued in the first round of the Nassau County Class AA playoffs for the top-seeded Lady Bruins (17-1 overall), who knocked off No. 8 Farmingdale, 56-42, on Feb. 22. Another strong defensive effort, in a season full of them for the two-time defending county champions, limited the Lady Dalers to just five points in the fourth quarter. Senior point guard Alex Hampton scored a game-high 21 points to lead a balanced offense that had three players score in double figures.

“As the game went on we started to wear on them a little bit,” Baldwin coach Tom Catapano said. “Farmingdale has a lot of great athletes and they were giving us problems earlier. We started switching [defensively] on all of the screens which stopped them from getting into the lane.”

Sophomore guard Mariah Butler, who’s made some of her biggest contributions on the defensive side of the floor, outscored Farmingdale by herself in the final quarter. She scored all seven of her points in a row during the frame on a three-pointer, a two-point basket and a pair of free throws.

The win pushed Baldwin into the quarterfinals against No. 4 Uniondale after presstime. The winner advances to the county title game at C.W. Post this Saturday at 4:15 p.m. against either Massapequa or MacArthur.

“The expectations are very high and they realize there is no guarantee anymore,” Catapano said of the single-elimination tournament.

In a rematch of last season’s Nassau County title game, also won by Baldwin, the Lady Dalers once again featured a 1-2-2 zone defense as a means to slow down the Lady Bruins’ attack. It didn’t work too well from the start, as Hampton led the offense to 19 points in the first quarter. Her aggressiveness also paid off at the free-throw line where she converted 7 of 8 attempts. “We forced them out of it and they had to play man,” Catapano said. “We had a lot of ball movement, were shot ready and had good spacing. We were not afraid to throw the skip pass and attack.

“Alex is tremendous. She was the best player on the court and probably has more experience than anyone in the County as a five-year varsity players and four-year starter.”

A buzzer-beating three-pointer by Nadine Hadnagy at the half trimmed Baldwin’s 14-point lead to 36-25 and gave the Lady Dalers both confidence and hope, but neither was enough. Senior guard Amber Harrison scored 10 points and senior forward Ayanna Hudson had 10 points and 10 rebounds for the Lady Bruins. “I think we have the best rebounding kids in the county,” Catapano said, also mentioning junior forward Janae DeGraff as a key contributor. “We can control the rebounding on offense and defense because of those two.”