Crown Point girls basketball turns back spirited fourth-quarter comeback and defeats visiting Chesterton, 47-35, in DAC second-place showdown

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The Chesterton girls basketball team bused to Crown Point for a big game Monday with first place at stake.
The Trojans didn’t win it, losing, 47-35, but still took some positives back home.
Big games sometimes can be too big for a freshman, but that clearly was not the case for Chesterton starting forward Ella Boyanski.
On this night, Boyanski was nothing less than Chesterton’s best player. She scored a team-high 15 points, showed some defensive smarts and helped the Trojans to cut into big deficits.
“Fearless,” Chesterton coach Candy Wilson said of Boyanski. “She’s a gamer. She’s a natural scorer. That’s her game.”
Boyanski had her share of Chesterton’s 14 first-half turnovers, but as has been the case all season, she didn’t let the quality of the opponent make her gunshy.
“You just have to never be scared,” Boyanski said. “Know that you belong. I always felt like I belonged, so I was never scared. You just have to get over that hump and match the physicality that everyone else is playing with and there’s really nothing else to it.”
Boyanski blends a soft shooting touch with advanced ballhandling skills with both hands. She had one coast-to-coast bucket that started with her stealing the ball, continued with her changing directions and dribbling with both hands and finished with her tossing a left-haned layup off the glass for a bucket.
“Every Sunday we don’t have practice and I’ll be working on it for a couple of hours in my basement,” Boyanski said of her ballhandling.
It shows.
Boyanski scored seven first-quarter points to give the Trojans a 9-8 lead despite the team already having seven turnovers. The lead grew to 13-9 before Crown Point went on an 18-0 run that started early in the second quarter and ended early in the third to take its biggest lead of the night.
Down 14, the Trojans had a lot of fight left in them and drew within two points with 4:25 remaining when Reese Dilbeck (8 of 10 points in the second half) hit a 12-footer to cap a nine-point run and cut the deficit to 33-31. Dilbeck started the run with a bucket, followed by a Boyanski field goal and a Lindsi McGuffey 3-pointer. Crown Point’s Mia Dutton responded with a 3-pointer to make it 36-31 and the Trojans never drew closer than three points after that.
The “funky defenses” that the visitors employed seemed to throw Crown Point for a loop at the outset, a big factor in Chesterton’s early lead. Allison Van Kley, the only senior to get into the game for the Trojans, opened the game shadowing Bulldogs leading scorer, guard Ava Richie as the Trojans employed a box-and-one defense. Then freshman Macie Pack took her turn on Richie, and for most of the game Addison Pack, Macie’s sophomore sister, checked her. Chesterton also employed a triangle-and-two defense at times, with Crown Point center Ivy Henderson being the other focal point of the defense with one defender fronting her at all times and another playing behind her when the ball appeared headed her way.
“Defensively, we did what we wanted to do with our triangle and two and box and one,” Wilson said. “We caused them some issues. We just didn’t capitalize on it at the other end.”
Dilbeck talked about what enabled the Trojans to play better in the second half.
“We came in at halftime and we said it’s a new half, just get back out there and play hard the rest of the game and we did,” she said.
The Trojans (14-7) finished the DAC regular season portion of the schedule with 5-2 record, good for third place. Crown Point (18-3, 6-1) finished second.
Chesterton's home game vs. South Bend Riley, originally scheduled for Tuesday and rescheduled for Wednesday, has been cancelled. The Trojans next play Friday at home vs. Andrean in the regular season finale. After that, they play chief rival Valparaiso, Tuesday, Feb. 3 in the Valpo sectional.
“I was hoping to see them in the championship, but still excited and ready to play,” Dilbeck said. “All of us are ready.”