For all the basketball tradition, for all the experience gained during the grind of a Public League season, Young’s girls had a gaping hole in their resume.
There was no state championship, nothing that said the Dolphins were unquestionably the best.
Until Saturday night.
Led by hot-shooting junior Ashlee Anderson, Young pulled away from Bolingbrook to take the Class 4A state title with a 54-45 victory at Redbird Arena in the first season of IHSA four-class basketball.
Anderson, a 5-foot, 9-inch guard, hit two critical three-pointers in the second half to help the Dolphins finish 30-3 and complete an unprecedented Public League sweep.
Their Windy City West rival, Marshall, won the Class 3A state championship earlier in the day.
“I had to be big in the second half because I wasn’t really doing anything for my team in the first half,” Anderson said.
She did hit a three-pointer with 17 seconds left in the second quarter to lift Young into a 20-20 tie.
That trend continued in the second half.
When Anderson dropped in a three-pointer with a minute left in the third quarter, Young had a 32-28 lead. When she opened the fourth quarter with a baseline drive for a traditional three-point play, the Dolphins led 35-30.
And when Anderson hit a three-pointer with 2:52 left, Young had its biggest lead at 47-37 over the Raiders (28-4), whose 24-game winning streak came to an end.
“This is what we’ve worked for,” Anderson said. “It’s a lot of work to be a Whitney Young Dolphin. All the running, all the practices. Everything.”
Porsha Harris had 11 points, seven rebounds for Young, which had to settle for third-place trophies in 2005 and 2006. D’Frantz Smart and freshman Chanise Jenkins scored nine and Kiara Conner came up with seven points and 11 rebounds.
All that helped counter the outstanding play by Bolingbrook freshman Ariel Massengale, who led the Raiders — 2006 state champions — into their third consecutive title game. She finished with a game-high 22 points.
“We made history tonight,” Conner said. “It means everything. This is what it came down to. We played our best basketball tonight.”
