“The back-to-back thing is hard, especially when you’re playing the same team.” – Fort Loramie coach Carla Siegel
Whether the games are close or not, winning a state championship is not as easy for top programs as some might assume.
Dayton, OH – Elite girls basketball programs like Fort Loramie and Waterford make winning look easy.
In their regions of Ohio, they are always expected to make deep tournament runs. And when they make it to state, as they often do, a consensus forms. Those who watch them often, and know the most about them, assume they will return home with the biggest prize.
But it’s never that easy.
Veteran columnist Jeff Gilbert writes Ohio State basketball and OHSAA sports for Press Pros Magazine.com.
That’s why Waterford’s Avery Wagner, the 6-foot-4 difference maker that no one else in Division VII has, walked into the postgame interview room at UD Arena with the state’s biggest prize after the Wildcats defeated the Redskins 48-46.
That prize, many expected, would be in the hands of Fort Loramie at 7:23 p.m. Saturday instead of Wagner’s.
But expectations were out of Fort Loramie’s control. High expectations from the outside are the price when last year’s prize is on display at your school, when you are the first girls program in Ohio to reach 1,000 wins and when you defeated Waterford by 13 points in the final last year.
But state championships, regardless of pedigree or past accomplishments, are really, really hard to win. Nobody knows that better than Redskins head coach of 26 years and four state titles Carla Siegel.
“I know they’re not happy, these players sitting next to me, but I’m so proud of them,” Siegel said. “The back-to-back thing is hard, especially when you’re playing the same team.”
Waterford head coach of 20 years and now three state titles Jerry Close knows it, too.
“It is extremely hard to get here, but what has happened since the first time we came in 15 is that group of girls laid the foundation for this,” Close said. “They expect to win. Unfortunately, so do our fans. I think we were fired two or three times last year because we didn’t do what fans thought we should be doing.”
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Wagner, as much as any player on the floor, knows how hard it is to win a state title, too. She and fellow seniors Kendall Sury and Avery Smithbeger were freshmen when Waterford won its last one. So four years later, and a year after that disappointing loss, she wasn’t going to let the prize out of her sight.
Wagner led two of her teammates and head coach to the interview podium. She set the trophy, with the net hanging around it, on the table in front of her. She had made a statement without saying a word.
I want everyone to see this trophy and understand how hard it was to win it.
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Last year after the loss to Fort Loramie, Wagner said the Wildcats would be back.
“Us three seniors, we keep our promises,” Wagner said. “We knew that we were going to come in here, and we had a feeling it was going to be Fort Loramie again. I knew that we could just get right back here again and win it this time.”
Close won his other titles in 2016 and 2022. Close lost in state finals last year and in 2017 and 2015. This was his ninth state tournament since 2015.
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“We really dug deep, and throughout the tournaments we faced so much physicality,” Sury said. “Thirty-two minutes left of our entire high school career, we knew what it needed to take, and we went out on the court and we did just that.”
In Fort Loramie land, they were ready to hang state banner No. 5 to go with the ones Siegel coached in 2013, 2015, 2021 and last year. Now the Redskins are state runner-up for the third time. And they’ve been to 14 state tournaments dating back to 1979.
“I always knew that we could do it, but it’s hard to beat a team that’s out for revenge,” Redskins senior start and leading scorer Avery Brandewie said. “It’s still a lot to be proud of. Our community will support us no matter what the outcome of this game would have been.”
By any measure – whether runner-up or champion – the Redskins succeeded. They had to replace three starters, seven seniors, four of whom played a lot. They had stars in Brandewie and Victoria Mescher back. They were coming together when sophomore point guard Maddie Shatto suffered a late-season and season-ending injury. And they persevered to get where they wanted to.
“People stepped it up,” Siegel said with conviction. “Mylee (Shatto) did a great job, Autumn Turner did a good job, Izzy Meyer off the bench, Ariel Heitkamp. There’s so many girls that played well.”
Mescher said her team didn’t let last year’s championship linger.
“We weren’t even worried about that,” she said. “There was pressure, and we felt like people were maybe putting the pressure on us. But I don’t feel like we felt affected by it because we knew this was a different team.”
Siegel was as gracious in defeat as anyone I’ve seen. She smiled and talked about what a great game it was. She is friends with Close and said she was happy for him. She clearly meant it.
Like any coach, Siegel plays to win and wants to win. But she knows this season, whatever the level of expectations others had for her team, will live on in her memory and the memories of her players.
“This was a great basketball game,” she said.
And she is right. The competitive effort of both teams hit the mark of what a state final in every division should rise to.
“One day these girls will look back and cherish this game,” Siegel said. “Their grit was there, their determination, their perseverance was there. So they really don’t have anything to hang their heads about.”
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