County's 'Super Six' Head to Final Four
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| Lee High senior Mia Puleri Sunday helps cut down the net in the Wildcats' gym in celebration of their Division 5 State Quarter-Final win on Saturday. |
Out of 10 No. 1 seeds in the MIAA basketball tournaments this winter – five boys, five girls – nine are still playing.
Those nine did not have to play the Lee High girls basketball team.
The ninth-seeded Wildcats pulled off arguably the season’s biggest upset on Saturday when they upended No. 1 Hopedale to reach this week’s state semi-final round.
On Sunday afternoon, the Lee girls got together to celebrate their Final Four berth in style, cutting down one of the nets in their gymnasium and boarding a flatbed for a parade down Main Street.
Senior captain Mia Puleri said that Lee, which trailed by as many as 15 in the fourth quarter on Saturday, was just the kind of team that could overcome that deficit on the road in a hostile environment against a heavy favorite.
“I think that our team is very level-headed,” Puleri said. “It’s something that we really pride ourselves on – not getting too excited, in the sense that that can go too fast and you can be almost too emotional sometimes.
“So we try to stay very even keeled, which means not getting too down or getting too high before the game is over. I think in the second half yesterday, when the pressure was building on Hopedale, we were still very even, because we had nothing to lose. We were the nine seed. They were the one seed.”
And now the Wildcats are one of just 40 high school basketball teams in the state still in action.
Six of those teams call Berkshire County home: the Lee girls; the Pittsfield girls, who kick off state semi-final week with a game against St. Mary’s of Lynn at Worcester State University on Monday; the Taconic boys, who advanced as a No. 6 seed in Division 3; the Drury boys, who have a chance on Tuesday to reach the state final and avenge last year’s loss to Pioneer Valley in the Elite Eight; the Monument Mountain boys, who also have revenge in mind when they play their semi-final game at Worcester State on Wednesday; and the Hoosac Valley girls, a perennial favorite and defending state champion in Division 5.
If it seems like Berkshire County is well represented in the basketball semi-finals, that is because it is.
The 11 county schools play in three of the state’s five size-based divisions: Division 3, Division 4 and Division 5.
In those three divisions, there are a combined 233 boys teams and 227 girls teams for a total of 460 teams.
Twenty-four of those 460 teams reach the Final Four, just 5.2 percent.
Six of the 21 Berkshire County teams (Mount Everett did not have a girls team this winter) are in the Final Four, or 29 percent of the county’s teams.
The Lee girls had the most difficult path of the bunch.
Not only were the Wildcats the only Berkshire County team to win its quarter-final game at home, Lee also was on the road in the Round of 16, making the trip to North County to face Drury.
As she has been all year for Lee, eighth-grader Giana Carlino was the leading scorer in Saturday’s win, accounting for 14 points in the 44-41 comeback victory.
Puleri was right behind her with 13 points – all at the free throw line. Puleri made 11 of 14 foul shots in the fourth quarter to help the Wildcats pull away after trailing all game.
“We definitely spend a good amount of time practicing those because we’re not very good at shooting them in games for some reason,” she said.
“Free throws are always an important factor in close games. It comes down to that. If you add ‘em up, that could change how the game goes. So we really spend a lot of time working on that.”
Now the Wildcats are working on a way to get past fifth-seeded Renaissance, a team that has had the number of Berkshire County teams and Lee in particular this winter.
The Phoenix beat McCann Tech twice, earned Western Massachusetts tournament wins over Drury and Lenox and beat Lee in both their regular season meetings.
Puleri said that going into Round 3, Lee has learned lessons, both as a competitor and an observer.
“I think it’s something different having them in our league and playing them again here,” she said. “I think that they might come out and say, ‘Oh, we beat this team twice.’ I think that might give us a leg up. Again, we have nothing to lose. We’re the underdogs. We’re the ones that aren’t supposed to win the game.
“I think our experience playing them will help us figure out a game plan. And I know a lot of our team was at the Renaissance-Lenox game, so even just watching them play a different team is really important – just seeing how they react to the other team and how they treat the other team is very important.”
