If there’s anything the Northern Heights girls basketball team has proven over the past week, it’s that the Ladycats are not a team to be counted out.
The Heights girls emphatically made that statement with their run to the Class 3A Sub-State title in Wellsville, a tournament in which the fourth-seeded Ladycats defeated the fifth-, first- and second-seeded teams in a field of eight teams.
In the second round, Heights earned its best victory of the season to date, knocking off its rival and the top-seeded Osage City Lady Indians, 40-35. Osage City had beaten Heights in the two teams’ three previous matchups this season, including one week earlier in a resounding 70-41 victory in Allen.
The Ladycats followed that with a 45-35 victory over No. 2-seeded Jayhawk-Linn in the Sub-State title game, earning Heights its first State Tournament berth since 1999.
“A lot of people didn’t even believe that we’d make it past the second round of Sub-State,” Heights coach Tim Riemann said, “so making it this far, the girls are pretty pumped.
“After our first-round game at Sub-State, we sat down and said, ‘Nobody thought we’d be here. We have a chance to go out and prove it to everyone that we deserve to be here.’ I thought we did a great job of responding.”
That underdog attitude in Sub-State might come in handy for an even bigger challenge that now awaits the Heights girls.
Heights (15-8) is the No. 7 seed at the Class 3A State Tournament in Hutchinson, with only eighth-seeded Atchison County Community (12-11) seeded lower than the Ladycats.
There is little doubt, then, that few are expecting much from the Ladycats. Their underdog status will be firmly in place when they open the tournament with a first-round matchup against No. 2-seeded Cimarron (22-1) at 3 p.m. Thursday.
But the Heights girls have gotten used to playing the us-against-the-world card, and this week would be no different, Riemann said.
“We’re going in there with nothing to lose. All the pressure’s on the other team,” Riemann said. “We can just go out and play basketball and have some fun.”
Of course, it helps that the Ladycats are perhaps peaking at the right time.
“We’re playing some of our best basketball right now,” Riemann said. “We’re just doing a pretty good job of executing. The last four games or so, our defense has really stepped up.
“We’ve been holding teams in the 30s. We’re not a team that scores a lot of points, but when we can hold a team down and take care of the basketball, I think we do a really good job.”
If Heights’ recent run of quality play continues into this week, then who knows, Riemann said, maybe Heights can make a little bit more noise before it’s all said and done.
“We’ve already shocked some people,” Riemann said, “and hopefully we can go to State and shock some more.”