Tribe simply makes shots

The game of basketball is often simple.
The team that puts the ball in the basket most often comes out as the winner.
So, it should come as no surprise that making shots, 3-pointers in particular, was a key to the Fort Recovery High School girls basketball team earning a state finals berth.
“We’ve got a bunch of good shooters,” said FRHS coach Doug Bihn at practice Monday. “And we tell them all the time, ‘If you’re open you’ve got to shoot.’ I don’t care if you miss four or five in a row, you’ve got to keep shooting the ball if you’re open. We’ll take a missed shot over a turnover every day of the week.”
Fort Recovery has been an impressive 3-point shooting team throughout the season, hitting an average of more than six per game.
Kendra Brunswick’s lone 3-pointer in its regional semifinal victory over No. 2 Lake was her 45th, breaking the single-season school record set by Holly Stein in 2006. And three other Indians — Holly Brunswick, Olivia Thien and Olivia Schwieterman — have each hit more than 20 3-pointers on the season.
Since the regular-season finale, however, the Indians’ shooting from long distance had been hit and miss. The team made seven 3-pointers apiece in the sectional and district championship games against Parkway and Evergreen respectively, but was shooting just 26 percent from beyond the arc through its first four tournament games.
They found their touch against sixth-ranked Africentric Early College, converting more 3-point shots than two-pointers.
“It was about time,” said senior Holly Brunswick, who hit all four of her four attempts from long distance in the game. “The game before that we had a terrible 3-point percentage, even our overall field-goal percentage was pretty bad. To finally be hitting some big shots when it counted … felt really good.”
The Indians were off the mark on three 3-pointers in the first 1:31 of Saturday’s Division III regional championship, falling behind 4-0 to Nubians. From that point on, they were lights out.
Senior Olivia Thien was 0-for-2 in the early going, but after her second miss Holly Brunswick grabbed the rebound and kicked it back out to her senior teammate. Thien didn’t hesitate, tossing up another 3-point attempt and burying it for Fort Recovery’s first points of the game.
She went on to hit two more triples and all of her five free-throw attempts to share the team-high of 16 points.
“It felt great,” said Thien, who was 0-for-4 from long distance in the Indians’ regional semifinal win over No. 2 Lake. “I don’t really know what sparked it or anything. … I just went out there and hit some shots and it just kept coming.”
Holly Brunswick, who matched Thien with 16 points, buried back-to-back 3-pointers later in the first period to give the Indians the lead for the first time. They rarely trailed again, and only twice in the second half.
Each time, it was a 3-pointer that almost immediately put them back on top.
Holly Brunswick hit the first, her fourth of the game, at the third-quarter buzzer off an assist from Thien to put the Indians back on top by one. And when FRHS fell behind by two with just three minutes to go, Holly’s sister, Kendra, was ready.
Although she had yet to hit a basket from long distance, she took a pass from Nicole Dilworth and fired away. Her shot from the left wing slipped through the net, giving the Indians the lead for good.
“I couldn’t make a shot,” said Kendra Brunswick, who had missed her first four 3-point attempts. “I felt like I was letting the team down. But I also wasn’t going to stop shooting. … It felt great to make it.”
Kendra Brunswick added four more points to finish with nine, as the Indians complimented their shooting from beyond the arc by hitting eight free throws in the final 1:06 to close out the win.
In all, the Indians shot 45-percent from 3-point range in dispatching a team that had been to the state championship game three times in the previous four seasons. And following the handful of misses early, they finished on a 9-of-17 run from long distance.
None of this should come as much of a surprise. Fort Recovery was simply following the team motto it has had on full display all season, emblazoned in giant capital letters on the front of its team T-shirts:
“MAKE SHOTS”.[[In-content Ad]]