By REID TUCKER
Things like four years’ worth of state basketball championships, each from a different local team, seems like the stuff of overly wishful thinking at best or, for the more cynical, a flat-out impossibility at worst.
Such things just don’t happen, shouldn’t happen, can’t happen. Won’t happen.
Tell that the Freeport Lady Bulldogs, who continued the fourth straight year of Area 5’s dominance in the FHSAA Class A state basketball championship series. Freeport’s girls (24-4) hoisted the trophy after laying a 46-36 welt on the Wildwood Lady Wildcats in the state final at the Lakeland Center on the afternoon of Feb. 19. The win puts the Lady Bulldogs among storied company, as Ponce De Leon won state in 2012, followed by South Walton in 2013 and Paxton in 2014.
The win marks the first championship in the history of Freeport’s girls hoops program and only the third state title of any kind in school history, after the boys team won in 1968 and the girls track team won ’86. Head coach Mike Myrick knew his team, feared for its lethal long-range shooting prowess and athleticism, had what it took to bring home the trophy all season long.
“This team had so many leaders, and everybody depended on everybody else,” he said at the homecoming welcome laid out at Freeport’s home gymnasium on Feb. 20. “The way we played in our last two games was just something else. We made Paxton and Wildwood extend further than they wanted to extend and we played unselfishly. We did what we had to do.”
What the Lady Bulldogs had to do was put in shots – specifically the deadly 3-pointers the team staked its life on – over the heads of Final Four opponents with rosters stocked with substantially larger and often taller players. Put in those shots they did, but it was no easy task, as four of the top-ranked Wildwood’s starting five were taller than Mary Kate Myrick, Freeport’s tallest at 5-foot-8.
The height disparity between the opposing sides meant it took a while for Freeport’s attempts to find their mark, but the Bulldogs got their swishes right when they needed them. Freeport scored on three of its four 3-point attempts in the last five minutes to surge ahead of the Wildcats before a 9-for-10 free throw showing drove the last nail in Wildwood’s coffin. Until then, Freeport had been unable to pull away from Wildwood, trailing by three at the end of the first quarter, then carrying precarious one- to three-point leads into subsequent periods.
The O’Neal sister put on a clinic in the semifinal against defending state champ Paxton, withering the Lady Cats under a hail of 3-pointers, making a combined 9-of-19 3s to put Freeport at 42 percent from that range. All told, they scored 56 points against Paxton, but Megan went 1-for-7 behind the arc against Wildwood, scoring 10 points, while Katie, who was named the 2015 FHSAA 1A Player of the Year, was 2-for-8. This meant the rest of the team had step up in a big way, step up they did.
Myrick went scoreless against Paxton, though Freeport nevertheless won a 72-49 blowout despite a Herculean 20-point effort from senior Bethany Neale, got two second-half 3s (one near the five-minute mark in Q4) against Wildwood, and she led the team with three steals – this just a few months after serious knee surgery. Laura Ham (10 points) went 6-for-13 from the floor in her last two games, but she made seven of her points deep in the last frame of the championship game, with the last two free throws putting Freeport up by its winning margin. Freeport’s greatest unsung asset in the game was freshman Devany Beard, who had the unenviable task of reining in Wildwood’s massive freshman Kari Niblack – no matter, Beard led the team with seven rebounds and helped hold Niblack to a manageable 12 points.
As for shooting, Freeport was 13-for-43 from the floor (7-for-28 from 3-point range), while Wildwood made 15-of-49, and the Bulldogs far outshone Paxton, going 24-for-51 versus the ‘Cats’ uncharacteristically bad 19-for-56 performance. Another area in which Freeport out-foxed its bigger opponents was in turnovers. The Lady Bulldogs proved to be the better ball-handling team, committing 11 turnovers to Wildwood’s 22 and 10 to the legitimately deft Paxton’s 11.
The end of the game was predictably and spectacularly emotional, with friends and sisters and fathers and daughters embracing each other individually before coalescing into a literal dogpile on the court. That jubilant spirit carried over into the team’s homecoming the following day. Fans, teachers and fellow students, along with a sizeable portion of the whole Freeport population came out in a show of support for the triumphant Lady Bulldogs.
Perhaps nobody could describe the team’s feelings better than Myrick, who battled back from two serious injuries in the last two years to share the glory of the championship with her dad, her volleyball comrade Ham, and indeed the whole community.
“I never thought I would play high school sports again,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “To be able to come back and start in the last two games, winning a championship with these girls is something I will never forget. It shows how much our community cares about us, knowing that we have all this support. We can come back here in 20 years and people will remember that we did this.”
