If Fenwick junior Catie Wallace were in a cartoon, a light bulb would have appeared above her head at a critical moment in the Fenwick girls water polo sectional championship game against Oak Park-River Forest on Saturday, May 16.
With the score tied at 5-5 and under four minutes to play, Wallace held the ball when an idea popped into her head. It was something that Friars’ head coach Jack Wagner had told her as the team prepped to face the Huskies’ Jordin Hale, one of the best high school goalies in Illinois.
“I heard about Jordin and her talent and skills,” Wallace said. “But coach told us that since she’s really tall and has long arms, you can lob it over her head. We had worked on that all week and in that moment I knew it was the right shot.”
So Wallace went with her instincts and placed a perfect lob over Hale’s head. It glanced off the crossbar and went in with 3:16 to play. That was the final goal of the game and Fenwick advanced to the state finals for the 12th consecutive season with a 6-5 win over its neighborhood rival.
“I don’t usually like lobs, but when the time comes you have to use it,” said Wallace, a Niles resident who finished with four goals.
Saturday’s game was a thriller from start to finish. The game was tied at 2-2 after the first period, but Fenwick (21-6-1) gained some breathing room and led 5-3 late in the third.
Genevieve Curry’s buzzer-beating goal cut OPRF’s deficit to 5-4 heading into the fourth. Jilly Cronin scored quickly for the Huskies to knot things up at 5-5 and that’s how the game remained until Wallace’s big goal.
“The plan was to make [Hale] work a lot harder than we did,” Wagner said. “Hale is very good, especially if she can lock on you. We thought if we would shoot the ball a little later in the shot clock we would get some better opportunities because we’d tire them out. They didn’t really tire out.”
With the victory, Fenwick advanced to the state quarterfinals at 5:45 p.m. Thursday, May 21 at Stevenson. The Friars will face Naperville Central, a team they beat earlier this season, 8-4.
Fenwick won the state championship last season but the girls don’t feel they’re in a situation where they will be measured by a repeat.
“We’ve proved people wrong this season and as long as we go there and play our hardest, then if we lose, we lose,” said Fenwick sophomore Kelly Frumkin, who scored the opening goal of the game. “If we know we played our best, that’s all we can do.”
“We’re just going to take it game by game,” Wallace added. “We’ll work on the first round and then the semifinals and then the finals.”
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Notes
* Fenwick goalie Anna Sullivan had 15 saves, while Hale finished with 14 saves for OPRF (29-3). “We fought hard,” Hale said. “This is the best game I’ve ever seen my team play. We all came together and didn’t make it easy for them. We just ran out of time.”
* Curry finished with three goals and three steals for the Huskies, while Cronin had two goals. Shannon Forst had the Friars’ other goal.