No. 2 Knights stop Riverside, 56-41

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

It isn’t a stretch to say that Sara Mosiman is the best player in the Class 2A girls tournament and the primary reason the King’s Knights’ drive to the championship game has seemed like little more than a coronation march.

But the reason they took that last step was not as much the girl who scored 25 points — Mosiman — as the one who scored just 2.

Clarissa Sather, left, and Brooke Simons, right, of King's team up on Riverside's Angela Hartill during Friday's Class 2A semifinal game.   JEFF HALLER/Yakima Herald-Republic View all photos for this story.

Hayley Zevenbergen’s defensive work all but turned 6-foot-2, Division I-bound Riverside center Angela Hartill into a non-factor in the Knights’ 56-41 semifinal victory, lifting King’s (25-1) into Saturday night’s 7:30 championship game against Chewelah (21-4).

Although Hartill scored 12 points, six of the game late, when the game was all but decided.

“Her defense on Hartill was amazing,” Mosiman said.

“She sure had a tough assignment,” Knights coach Eric Rasmussen said. “My goodness, Hayley battled her for 32 minutes. I thought that was the difference in the game.”

While Mosiman was leading the offense with 10-for-17 shooting and Danielle Clauson and Caitlyn Faitley were chipping in 13 and 12, respectively, Hayley was giving up four inches and probably 40 pounds to Hartill. But Hartill managed only four shot attempts in the first half and all six of her second-half points came as the result of offensive rebounds.

“We like to call her Bionic Hayley,” Faidley said. “But her ankles are taped, her knee is wrapped, her whole right leg is totally bruised from soccer, her shoulder’s sore. And — I don’t know if I should say this — but she’s one of the sweatiest persons all the time, because she works so hard in there.”

The fact that Zevenbergen took only two field goal attempts — and missing both, incidentally — took nothing away from her value to the Knights.

“Hayley’s going to give us something from the offensive end,” Rasmussen said. “But what she gives us on the defensive end and in our half-court set is just so much more. She picked up those two fouls early, and we generally pull her when she gets two, but she kept shaking her head and saying, ‘I’ll be right, I won’t foul.’”

“I think we feel more secure with Hayley down there,” Mosiman said. “Hayley shutting her (Hartill) down gave us more confidence to go in there and try to draw a foul.

Not that that always worked. Mosiman was speaking with a swollen eye, the result of catching an almost brutal forearm across the face — with no foul called, incidentally — on a late-game drive to the basket. She tested negative on preliminary checks for a concussion, and later said she’d be just fine. “I was just a little woozy,” she said.

And the Knights were just too good. After jumping to a 12-2 lead, they missed 14 of their next 18 shots of the first half ... and still expanded their lead to a dozen points, 26-14.

Early in the third quarter, Faidley hit a 3-pointer to trigger a 10-point run, with Mosiman getting the last two baskets of the spurt. That bumped the score to 38-18, and even though Jamie Hinkley scored five points in a 10-0 run for the Rams, the Knights’ lead never dipped under double digits.

Zevenbergen’s work on Hartill made sure of that.

“She’s probably the best center I’ve ever played against,” Zevenbergen said. “We tried to stay in front of her the whole time. Our defense is team-oriented. I had help the whole time. It wasn’t just me.”

No, and this wasn’t just any game. It was the state semifinals, and even the Knights — whose only loss came to a 4A-sized Bay Area school in a San Diego holiday tournament — felt the pre-game jitters.

“There’s nerves before every game,” Mosiman said. “But we had a lot of fire. I think the want overtook the nerves.”