Donato sparks Cougars' 50-39 consolation victory

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

White Swan senior Nancy Donato is one of those basketball players who’s easy to overlook, unless you happen to be a coach or a real aficionado of the game.

White Swan's Emy Lawrence, left, looks to get the ball around Warden's Mirielle Pixton during their state tournament game Thursday morning at the Yakima Valley SunDome.   JEFF HALLER/Yakima Herald-Republic View all photos for this story.

She’ll never be the high scorer; that’s Andrea Blodgett. She’s not the one bringing the ball down the court and making the fancy passes; that’s Shelbi Strom. She’s not the towering center. Of course, the diminutive Cougars don’t have one of those anyway.

But the Cougars are still alive in the state tournament, 50-39 winners over Warden on Thursday, and set to face Ilwaco on Friday with a Class 1A state trophy at stake. And they have Donato to thank for that.

Even if the box score doesn’t show it.

Assistant coach Joe Blodgett says of Donato, “You can’t stat all her contributions.”

Maybe not, but in the third quarter — with her team struggling mightily against a team it had beaten handily twice during the regular season — her contributions were everywhere.

During the Cougars’ 16-6 run in the period — the only stretch in which either team gained an advantage, having played to a 20-20 halftime tie — Donato scored a nifty fast-break basket on a pass from Blodgett that clearly sparked her teammates. Over the next four minutes, she made three steals and assisted on baskets by Emy Lawrence and Blodgett. And she also pulled down a pair of rebounds, one of them the kind that makes highlight shows.

“From a coach’s standpoint, to see her rise about the crowd and grab that perfect rebound, it’s comforting to see that,” Cougars coach Adam Strom said. “Nancy’s a great athlete. We don’t know if we’re going to get 12 points or two points out of her on any given night, but we know she’ll always give a great effort.”

That kind of effort is critical when a team is shooting as poorly as the Cougars had for their first six quarters of the tournament — 18-for-70, including their opening-round loss to defending champion Colfax.

“It took a while for us to get into our game here,” Donato said. “There was a lot of first-game jitters for most of us. I kind of knew we were going to put them (Warden) away, because we could. We all just kind of picked it up in the second half — we passed it around, we all touched the ball, and just tried to go to the open spot.”

Blodgett finished with a team-high 12 points, while the freshman Strom added 9. The most efficient shooters for the Cougars for the day were Emy Lawrence (3-for-3) and Shelbi Strom’s older sister, Sheena, who came off the bench to shoot 3-for-4 and pull down four rebounds in 16 minutes of play.

The Cougars had no answer for Warden junior center Dana Bates, who made nine of 16 field-goal attempts, led her team with 21 points and also pulled down seven rebounds, tying Blodgett for game-high honors.

But White Swan did enough in that second half, when they picked up six of their eight assists, to offset Bates’ efforts.

“Good passes,” Adam Strom said, “lead to goos shots.”

And, on Thursday, to a White Swan victory.