BARRE, Vt. — Saturday night’s VPA Division III girls’ basketball final brought heartbreak for Windsor High as it came up just short of repeating as champions, falling 55-53 in overtime to Hazen High at Barre Auditorium.
With under three seconds left in overtime, tied at 53 apiece, the Yellow Jackets fouled Wildcats’ junior Kelsie Rivard, sending her to the line.
Rivard hit both free throws to cap off a 30-point night and give No. 1 seed Hazen a state championship as the No. 2 seed Jacks could not get a shot up before the final buzzer.
“We had opportunities to win — we couldn’t get the stop when we needed to,” said Windsor Head Coach Kabray Rockwood. “I don’t know if we were like 100% the wayI thought we would be — we still battled.”
Junior Callie Spaulding was the Jacks’ leading scorer in the loss with 14 points. Sophomore Amelia Rockwood, who had 13 points, and senior Cassie Clark, who had 11 points, were the other Windsor players to score in double figures.
While Rockwood said he would never blame a loss on officiating, he acknowledged that it was a factor in the game. “I don’t know if I loved the officiating all that much… I felt like they overturned a couple of calls.”
After a tightly contested first half, the Wildcats owned a 23-21 advantage. That two-point lead might have been more if not for some timely shots down the stretch from Spaulding and freshman Addison Crane, who finished the night with nine points.
The third quarter belonged to Windsor. After some nice back-and-forth action, the Jacks got themselves a 37-33 lead by the end of the frame, in large part because of the trio of Rockwood, Clark, and Spaulding, who combined for 14 of the Jacks’ 16 points in the quarter.
As both squads battled in the fourth quarter, the contest was tied 45-45 with just under two minutes remaining in regulation.
Down the stretch in a tied game, it was Rockwood who tried to will her squad to a win. She got to the line with 1:34 remaining and hit one free throw to give the Jacks a 46-45 lead.
However, the Wildcats answered about a minute later on a layup by junior Mya Lumsden to swing momentum and a lead back to Hazen.
Once again, though, it was Rockwood who gave the Jacks a lead, this time on a layup with 20 seconds left.
Down by one, Hazen got to the line with under five seconds remaining. Rivard missed the first free throw but hit the second to force overtime.
Windsor led by as much as two with under a minute remaining in the extra period. The Jacks had a chance to extend that lead to four with 47 seconds left, but came up empty from the charity stripe.
Rivard would make the Jacks pay. She hit a layup with about 20 seconds left to tie the game, 53-53, and then hit the game-winning free throws to extinguish Windsor’s chance at a repeat.
“We went through a lot of adversity this year, and we found ourselves at the end… We worked hard, and we gave ourselves an opportunity, and it just didn’t fall our way,” Rockwood said.
“Our program is a proud program. We’ve been here five times in a row, and we’ve gotten three out of five. We made them work for it, and it just didn’t happen,” he added.