By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
For the first time since 2014, the Mt. Edgecumbe High Lady Braves advanced to the championship game in the state basketball tournament, but took second place overall after losing to Grace Christian High in the title match on Saturday.
Competing in Anchorage’s cavernous Alaska Airlines Center, Mt. Edgecumbe stumbled in the first quarter of the final match and allowed the Grace Christian Grizzlies to gain an edge. The Braves kept the top-seeded team from stretching their lead for the remainder of the game, but couldn’t rally from that first quarter deficit and lost 49-38.
Sitka High opened at state with a two-point loss to the Barrow Whalers that sent the Lady Wolves into the consolation bracket. Following that loss Sitka beat the Bethel Warriors 54-29 but fell 29-28 to the Kenai Kardinals in the final game of the season, Friday. Sitka took sixth place out of eight teams in the tournament.
Though her team’s final game at state was a challenge, Mt. Edgecumbe senior Hannah Ekada looked at the bright side.
“We’re glad we got second. We were glad we made it onto championships overall, because we were moved up from regionals from second place,” Ekada told the Sentinel Tuesday. “And so just being there was a good thing for us.”
She approached the game somewhat nervously due to the reputation and height of Grace Christian’s team.
“In the beginning, we were kind of still tense, because they were pretty tall players, despite them being young,” said Ekada. “And they’ve known each other for their whole lives, whereas we’ve known each other for four seasons.”
Grace Christian’s team this season included almost no upperclassmen, but fielded a remarkable showing of freshman and sophomore talent.
Mt. Edgecumbe junior Carliese O’Brien noted that the title game was the Lady Braves’ best performance against the Grizzlies, whom they played in the regular season.
“We’ve played them before (and) the state tournament was one of the best games we’ve had against them,” she said. The Grizzlies’ defense shut down much of Edgecumbe’s offensive firepower and prevented a rally, she recalled.
“We know that they’re taller than us, so we knew we had to play confidently,” MEHS junior Tessa Anderson said. In terms of basketball skills, the teams were a fairly even match, but the Anchorage team had the advantage of having played together even before high school.
Lady Braves coach Candis Cook said, “They had a lot of freshmen and sophomores, but the coach told me that Grace Christian had been playing together since middle school or elementary. So even though they’re a young team, they were a good team.”
This is Cook’s first year coaching the Lady Braves. Previously she was the athletic director and basketball coach at the 1A school in Anaktuvuk Pass, a village off the road system north of the Arctic Circle.
Summing up the championship game, Cook said, “In the second, third, fourth quarters, we actually stayed neck-and-neck with them, but that first quarter really killed us.”
But she was proud of the team’s second-place finish in the state 3A Division.
“Even though the season didn’t end the way we wanted it to end, there was still a tremendous amount of growth on and off the court. And so I’m just proud of that. And I’m proud that the girls did what they did to get us as far as we got,” the coach said.
The Lady Braves went into the state bracket after placing second in the Eastern Conference tournament following a loss to Sitka High earlier this month.
At state, Mt. Edgecumbe got started by toppling Valdez 49-34 and followed that up with a 40-35 win over Monroe Catholic on Thursday, a game that sent them into the title match two days later.
In the boys bracket, Mt. Edgecumbe won their opening game 43-37 against Kenai but took fifth place after a 50-33 loss to Grace Christian and a 65-59 defeat against the Houston Hawks in the consolation game.
While the Braves’ defense was capable against Grace, Edgecumbe struggled to get through the top-seeded team’s press, senior Miles Bourdukofsky said.
“Being confident that we can possibly beat these guys and just not giving up because they’re a number one team… Our defense went great but offensively we just weren’t doing good,” he said.
Kaison Hermann, a junior, had a similar impression of the loss to Grace Christian.
“We had to play well, we had to box out, play good defense, rebound,” said Hermann. “We crashed the boards in that game; we got a lot of rebounds. I think we’re just slacking on offense, but our defense was really good.”
Grace went on to win the boys tournament with a 64-33 victory against the Nome-Beltz Nanooks in the final match.
The second round loss pitted MEHS against a team familiar to them, their Eastern Conference rivals, the Houston Hawks. Houston beat Edgecumbe earlier in March to secure the conference championship and repeated that performance Saturday in Anchorage.
The last game of Bourdukofsky’s high school basketball career boiled down to a single thing: “stopping their main scorers.”
Playing fairly early in the morning, Hermann said the teams went into the matchup fatigued, but fast breaks from Hawks star Hayden Howard proved too much to counter.
“In the final game, that was an early game too, so we had to have high energy for that one,” Hermann said. “They get a lot of fast breaks and that helps them a lot. One of their players – Hayden Howard – is really good at fast breaks and can also shoot super well. We had to stop their best players.”
With Howard working in unison with his high-scoring teammate Cole Taylor, the Hawks’ offense was more than Edgecumbe’s defense could handle.
Bourdukofsky wasn’t happy to see the season end.
“It was pretty sad, but it was good.”
With basketball wrapped up, many Edgecumbe students are already training for their next activity, Native Youth Olympics.
Mt. Edgecumbe’s Tessa Anderson attempts to steal the ball from Grace Christian’s Ella Boerger during the girls 3A championship game at the Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage on Saturday. (Emily Mesner / Anchorage Daily News)
