Girls basketball: Hillsborough outlasts West Orange to win first state championship

PISCATAWAY — It looked for a while as if the Hillsborough High School girls basketball team might have met its match in Sunday’s NJSIAA Group 4 final.

One of the Raiders’ primary weapons is their conditioning and hustle, allowing them to run most teams out of the gym, and that’s certainly been the case for much of their postseason run. But when Boro ran into a team in West Orange, not only capable of matching the Raiders’ intensity, but doing it with a pretty good size advantage, Hillsborough had to dig down for a little something extra, and it certainly did.

Senior Cesci Schiro finished with 17 points and eight rebounds, classmate Mya Loniewski pitched in 16 points, and sophomore Bella Ruh notched nine points and four boards and Hillsborough claimed the first state championship in program history, holding off 32 minutes of intense competition and overcoming a big second-quarter deficit to best the Mountaineers 55-52 at Jersey Mike’s Arena at Rutgers University.

“We’re very similar teams,” said Hillsborough coach Courtney Tierney, whose team beat West Orange 58-54 in the regular-season finale on Feb. 20. “They kept hustling, too, and their good players scored every time they needed to score. It was back and forth the whole game, so it made it very challenging.”

“I think it was very challenging because whenever we would get a run, they would get a run, so it was very back and forth,” Loniewski said. “But I trusted my teammates so much and I know that we can pull through anything. We’ve been in close games before and we’ve beaten them before, so we knew what it was like and we were able to pull through.”

Hillsborough came out running, getting a pair of 3-pointers from Loniewski early in the first quarter as the Raiders built a 10-3 lead. But West Orange had plenty of intensity of its own, matching Boro’s pace and it was a three-point Raiders lead at 14-11 after one quarter.

The second period, however, belonged to the Mountaineers, as senior star Anaya Karriem went to work offensively, as well as on the boards, scoring eight of her game-high 23 points in the period and grabbing four rebounds on her way to 13 for the game. Hillsborough, meanwhile, went cold from the field, shooting 3-for-9 from beyond the arc in the period, getting a pair from Schiro and one from Ruh, but trailed 29-23 at halftime.

And while Karriem came out hot again to start the third, with West Orange building its advantage to 35-27 just two minutes into the stanza, the fouls started to pile up, especially for the Mountaineers, with Karriem spending much of the quarter on the bench with four infractions after scoring her 1,000th career point early in the period.

The Raiders took advantage, closing the quarter on a 16-2 and 12-0 run to lead 29-25 headed to the final quarter, with both Karriem and Rhyan Watt carrying four fouls. But it didn’t take long for Hillsborough to get into its own foul trouble, with both Schiro and senior Reghan Bice carrying four, but it did little to slow the game’s pace.

“I don’t think the aggressiveness of the game changed, but we did have to be more careful,” Schiro said. “Four fouls, I know, but it was our last game and we had to play our hearts out.”

Hillsborough certainly did that, even after West Orange began the fourth on a 7-0 run to go up 44-43, but Bice drained a wide-open 3 pointer to give the Raiders back the lead and Loniewski followed with a pair of buckets to give Boro some breathing room. Still, the Mountaineers kept fighting, getting to within two points with just over two minutes remaining, and cut the deficit to 53-52 with 48 seconds left when Karriem grabbed her 1,000th career rebound on the offensive boards and put it back up for the bucket.

But Hillsborough remained poised, as usual, with Loniewski putting the final touches on the win, emerging wide open from a midcourt scrum, taking a pass and laying it in for the final margin.

“We’ve been down 20 in a game this year, we’ve been down 14, and we know that we’ve just got to keep playing,” Tierney said. “We talk about that often. And Mya and Cesci run the show and they’re so calm, so they just keep everyone else calm.”

“It’s what we worked for all year,” Schiro said. “We have a poster in our locker room and it has our goals on it, and this was the big one.”

It’s an all-time group for Hillsborough, led by the Sienna-bound Schiro, who finishes her career with a program-record 2,106 points. She and Loniewski started every game the past four years, losing a sectional final as freshmen, winning the section last year with three freshmen in the starting lineup, but losing in the state semifinals, to winning it all this season.

“It feels amazing. I love that we went all the way this year and each year we went further and got better, and closer as a team and closer to our coach,” Loniewski said. “Everything fell into place this year and I’m so proud of everyone for pulling through this game.”

“I’m just so proud of them,” Tierney said. “They hustled, as usual. They just outhustled them and that’s what they’ve done all along.”

BOX SCORE

HILLSBOROUGH (26-6) 11-18-8-15—52

WEST ORANGE (26-8) 14-11-18-12—55

SCORING: H-- Schiro 17, M. Loniewski 16, Ruh 9, Bice 5, N. Loniewski 4, Gaspar 4; WO--Karriem 23, Watt 15, Gary-Grayson 9, Muhammed 5.

REBOUNDS: H-- Schiro 8, N. Loniewski 4, Ruh 4, Bice 2, Gaspar 2, M. Loniewski 1; WO--Karriem 13, Watt 3, Curry 2, Gary-Grayson 2.

Simeon Pincus has been covering NJ sports since 1997. He can be reached at CNGirlsHoops@aol.com. Follow him on Twitter @SimeonPincus

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: NJ Girls basketball: Hillsborough wins first ever state championship

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