Oh, so Sweet 16: Shelby wins first district championship since 1999 with win over Clear Fork

ASHLAND – Usually, Shelby senior Sophie Niese stuffs the stat sheet — and hardly ever is it with points.

In Saturday's 57-33 Division II district championship win over Clear Fork, she still did all of the little things, but this time she also made an impact on the scoreboard. Niese finished with 18 points, eight rebounds, seven assists and four steals to lead the Whippets to their first district championship since the 1998-99 season.

Shelby advanced to play Akron Copley, a 30-28 winner over Shaker Heights in the Elyria district final, in a regional semifinal at 8 p.m. Tuesday at Mansfield Senior.

The Whippets trailed 10-9 at the end of the first quarter as nerves on the biggest stage seemed to get the best of both teams. High-scoring senior Olivia Baker was saddled with found trouble for most of the night, and that gave way to Niese to do her thing.

She scored nine points in the second quarter to help the Whippets take a 28-16 halftime lead as she provided the offense and the entire team picked up the defensive effort, holding the Colts to just seven points in the quarter.

“They just played really good defense,” Clear Fork coach Scott Sellers said. “We can’t blame it on the stage because we have played three really big games now, but their pressure got to us. Any team that faces that pressure is going to struggle. They defended us very well.”

Shelby coach Natalie Lantz said the biggest focus in the Whippets' preparation was how to defend the Colts and 6-foot-4 center Bekah Conrad, and she said her team executed the game plan to near perfection.

“I was thrilled,” Lantz said. “We thought it would come down to how we handled defensive pressure. We gave Sarah Reiser a very big task of fronting Conrad the entire game, and she did a great job.

"The energy we played with was fantastic. Our guard pressure was the difference because we wanted to make sure they worked hard to get the ball inside. Our guards did a nice job. Great team effort.”

The Colts (21-5) allowed Shelby to take a 16-10 advantage in the third to pad the lead to 44-26 and, by then, it was a little too late to make a comeback and the Whippets put it in cruise control the rest of the way.

“They are just really good,” Sellers said. “They have a Division III basketball player who can play Division II who couldn’t play much tonight and yet they have two other kids on full-ride scholarships to Division II schools next year. That is how good they are.

"After those two, they have two freshmen who can ball, they have Audi Albert, who is going to be a stud. They are well-coached, well-conditioned and you just have to give credit where it is due. They are awesome. They deserve this win because they worked hard for it.”

Lantz was particularly proud of Niese, who scored all but two of her points in the second and third quarters. She led the team in scoring while Audi Albert chipped in 11 and Olivia Baker 12, with Reiser also doing some damage on the offensive end with seven points.

“We weren’t sure if they were going to go with a zone against us or man-to-man,” Lantz said. “If they went man, we were going to try and utilize Sophie a lot more and they didn’t have an answer for her. Today, she needed to score and she tends to do that for us when we need her to. She is so unselfish and gets all of her teammates involved, but today she did a great job of taking the shots she needed to take.”

Baker, who spent much of the second and third quarters on the bench with foul trouble, was happy to have a front-row seat to watch Niese, the Division II District 6 Player of the Year, put on a show.

“She was definitely a key reason we won tonight,” Baker said. “I am so proud she finally got her points. She doesn’t look to score, but in that second quarter she took on a much bigger role and led us to a win.”

With Baker and her twin sister, Haylee, who is working her way back from a knee injury, out for much of the game, Niese knew it had to be her time to step up.

“Olivia is our bucket-getter,” Niese said. “She is going to come out and hit a 3 in someone’s eye and it would swing the momentum, but with her out I knew I needed to step up and get buckets when we needed them. They were face-guarding me so I had plenty of chances to get open. I was also hitting shots tonight, which makes it nice.”

The Colts finished the season with 21 wins — tied for the most in program history with the 1988 team — and a district runner-up finish, their first district trophy since the 1988-89 season.

“I think it is very important to our culture that we can win the right way and lose the right way,” Sellers said. “We have five losses this season and three of them are to the best team I have seen, another is to Pleasant, which won a district title, and the last one was to River Valley, which is phenomenal. Take a generational team like Shelby has out of the equation and we might be in the Sweet 16 ourselves.”

The 21 wins is also one more win than the last three years combined as Sellers, in his second year at the helm of the program, could only thank his players and especially his seniors for leading the way back.

“I had kids last year coming off of three straight seasons of winning six, seven games and I really didn’t think many of those kids were going to play last year,” Sellers said. “In a COVID year, a head coaching change, I am so glad they stuck with it. They became so coachable and overall great kids who compete the right way. We want the culture and environment that Shelby has now and I believe we will get there.”

Conrad scored 13 points in the final game of her Clear Fork career and Pacey Chrastina, who will be a huge part of the program moving forward, also added 13. Trinity Cook and Bella Molina also played their final games as Colts.

Shelby finally exercised some demons that haunted it at the district level after falling in the semifinals and finals in each of the last three years.

“I am just so proud of the girls because they reached something that were capable of doing,” Lantz said. “We had to want it more, and we did. We had a good feeling and a lot of confidence despite having a couple of players out. Our girls stepped up big today and it is special for them to win it. It is one thing to dream it and it is a completely different thing to achieve it.”

Baker said she is happy to say she is a district champion for the first time in her career.

“It feels awesome because this is something we have been working toward for four years,” she said. “It was such a great game and fun atmosphere. I knew I didn’t want to be done and I wanted this district championship and to put our number on that board.”

Niese agreed.

“We had a lot of goals this year and of course we wanted to win in the regular season, but this was the big one,” she said. “All the work we did with Troy Baker in the gym since we were little kids was all worth it. I couldn’t tell you how many Sundays I spent at the Shelby Y with him and his girls.”

jfurr@gannett.com

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Twitter: @JakeFurr11

This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Sophie Niese flirts with triple-double in Shelby's district title win