STATE CHAMPIONSHIPS ROUNDUP

Atherton Sacred Heart 48, Calvary Chapel 43--The rims at Arco Arena might have been tight, as players said. Or maybe the players were tight when it counted.

Or maybe they were just unlucky.

But Calvary Chapel’s 23-game winning streak ended one game short of a first girls’ basketball state championship Saturday. And it ended because the ball played precariously on the rim.

And fell out, as Atherton Sacred Heart won the Division IV girls’ title game and its fifth state championship.

The Gators (30-6) moved into second place on the all-time list of state champions, trailing only Brea Olinda, which has seven.

Calvary Chapel (28-6) was making its first championship appearance.

“Toward the end, we missed a couple of big shots; they went in and out,” Coach Russ McClurg of Calvary Chapel said. “T.J. [Gause] missed one in the corner, Cathy [Joens] misses a layup that goes in and out. I mean, c’mon.”

Calvary Chapel trailed at halftime, 24-21, but the Eagles fell behind by 10 in the third quarter as 6-foot-3 Courtney Laird, who had 15 points, 10 rebounds, scored eight of her team’s 13 points.

Sacred Heart led going into the fourth quarter, 37-28, and was up, 44-35, with 3:55 remaining.

But the Eagles had one more rally left.

Shayna Fabre made two free throws. Gause made a short basket, and Joens scored four seconds later after a steal.

Calvary Chapel trailed, 44-41. Momentum had swung.

“I think we were getting a little too relaxed,” said Sacred Heart’s best defensive player, Janessa Jurian. “We were thinking too much that we had it. It was a wake-up call.”

The Eagles weren’t done. They still got shots, good shots. But they went one for eight with the game on the line.

As Calvary Chapel struggled, Sacred Heart converted five of six free throws to stretch the lead to 48-41.

Calvary Chapel went seven shots without a basket before Joens’ layup in the final seconds.

Joens scored 18 points, making nine of 26 shots. She was zero for eight from three-point range.

“We wanted to hold Joens under 20 and make her really work hard for that,” said Coach Lamont Quattlebaum of Sacred Heart. “We wanted to hold the rest of the team to 14-15 points.”

Calvary Chapel got 25 points from its other players, including seven apiece from Marcene Guerrero and Fabre.

“A gym’s a gym,” Joens said of the rims, though some of her teammates said they were tight. “I had open shots. I just missed. . . . You can’t afford to not take shots.”

Sacred Heart’s role players took their shots, too.

Jurian, who had 11 rebounds, was averaging 3.4 points and only four shots a game, but scored 10, all in the first half.

Melissa Bayol, a freshman point guard who averaged 5.9 points, scored 10.