Any chance the Spooner girls basketball team had of pulling off a major upset in the WIAA state tournament didn’t last very long.
Rory Salvesen and Melaina Granquist made sure it didn’t happen.
The Wittenberg-Birnamwood senior duo combined to score 60 points Feb. 27 in a 78-21 Division 3 regional semifinal win over the Rails on the Chargers’ home court. The Chargers followed that win with a 75-49 win over Bloomer the following night and will now face Mosinee in a sectional semifinal at 7 p.m. March 5.
The Chargers came into the game against Spooner with a 24-0 record and a No. 1 seed, while the ninth-seeded Rails headed to Wittenberg after handing Tomahawk a 50-46 loss three days earlier.
“We came out just the way we needed to be,” coach Nick Mechelke said. “We had talked about that since Tuesday. We went and watched (Spooner) and I said, ‘Hey, they’re going to give us some looks, we have to come out and get after them right away and get out to a good lead, especially in our first game of the playoffs.’”
That’s exactly what happened, as the Chargers scored the game’s first 27 points, held the Rails without a basket for the first nine minutes and built a 57-12 halftime lead.
Salvesen and Granquist had 25 and 20 points, respectively, at the break, and Salvesen scored her 2,000th point with a basket that gave her team a 27-0 lead.
The Rails didn’t have an answer for the Chargers’ full-court press, which caused several turnovers in the first half.
“Our press has helped us all year, and it’s hard to work on it in practice, because you’ve got to have some athletes to be able to play that,” Mechelke said. “It puts other teams in a bind, so it’s a big strength for us.”
Salvesen went on to lead all players with 36 points, while Granquist chipped in with 24. Both players also finished with four 3-pointers.
The win over the Rails came one week after the Chargers wrapped up an undefeated regular season with a 69-31 nonconference win over Stratford.
“We had a lot of minutes out of a lot of kids today and that’s what we wanted,” Mechelke said. “We wanted to get our bench some minutes so we can rest for tomorrow.”
Wittenberg-Birnamwood’s Ava Brei and Spooner’s Ava Thompson watch the opening tipoff of a state tournament game at Wittenberg-Birnamwood High School. (Greg Seubert)
