WESTHAMPTON — Maddie Pond buried Belchertown’s playoff chances under the weight of three fourth-quarter 3-pointers.
The Orioles girls basketball team spent the entire third quarter clawing back against Hampshire Regional, cutting their deficit to eight with 45 seconds left in the third on a Jenna Birks runner.
Pond snatched momentum back with a 3 six seconds into the fourth quarter that put the Raiders up 11. She splashed another one 1:05 later to go up 14. The roar in the gym escalated with each basket. Pond had her hand on the volume knob and kept cranking.
“Everybody in the fan section is telling me ‘shoot it, shoot it,’ my whole team is yelling at me to shoot,” Pond said. “When I hit it, it gets us on even more of a run.”
Her final 3 pushed Hampshire’s margin to 20 with 4:04 left. The Raiders won 61-42 and earned a spot in the Western Massachusetts Division 3 Tournament with their 10th win in their final regular-season game.
“Relief, for sure, and excitement,” Pond said. “We’re in the tournament and our record is 0-0.”
Pond scored 12 of her game-high 23 points in the fourth quarter and added 11 rebounds, eight assists and seven steals. Many of her steals came in Hampshire’s press when she picked off Belchertown outlet passes.
“Her court vision, offensively and defensively, is fantastic,” Hampshire coach Amy Cyr said. “She’s in passing lanes, her hands are great.”
Hampshire (10-10, 3-5 Suburban) initially built its lead in the second quarter. It trailed 13-12 after the first when Belchertown senior Madi Duffy rattled home a 3 with five seconds left. Then the Raiders ripped off a 7-0 run capped by a Kyleen Labrecque free throw with 5:16 to halftime. The lead grew behind Pond’s defensive pressure and strong interior play from Delaney Marek and Maggie Rubeck. Marek finished with 17 points and seven rebounds, while Rubeck had seven points and six rebounds.
“Coach said we needed to focus on the basics of the game, and I feel like that really came together tonight,” Marek said.
It also leveraged a vulnerability for Belchertown (8-12, 4-4). The Orioles were playing without their two leading rebounders and needed to shuffle players’ positions around.
“We tried to compensate for that, and the girls did a good job,” Belchertown coach Jay Woodcock said. “It’s not their natural position to play there in the low post. I give all the credit in the world to those girls.”
Hampshire pushed its second-quarter lead to 13 when Lila Labrie nailed a jumper at the halftime buzzer.
Belchertown dug in to start the third quarter and chipped away. The Orioles have relied on their defense to carry them all season, but their offense sparked with its end threatening. Senior guards Emma LeBlanc and Elise Pikul scored 15 and 13 points, respectively, and combined for four 3s, helping reduce the deficit to single digits by the end of the third quarter.
“We’re not a team built to come back,” Woodcock said. “We’d dug ourselves a hole and we wanted to get out of it, which we did.”
The Orioles had chances to whittle the deficit further but missed layups that would have tightened the game. Then Hampshire pulled away in the fourth quarter, sending the Raiders to the postseason and the Orioles to the end of their season. It was the final game for Belchertown seniors Birks, Pikul, Duffy, LeBlanc and Jocelyn Leja.
“We have a great relationship, they’re going to be missed,” Woodcock said. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
The Raiders dropped six of seven games in January and early February to put their qualification in doubt, but Hampshire won two of its final three games to get a shot to defend its sectional title.
“Unfortunately it felt like we were already in the tournament because of the situation we got ourselves in,” Cyr said. “The season starts again. Lets’s get back there.”