In the third quarter of last week’s women’s basketball game between Lebanon Valley and King’s, LVC guard Abbie Reed hit the floor as she went spelunking for a loose ball, and while amid a tangle of bodies somehow slipped a pass to teammate Brielle Reidinger for an easy basket.
That made the score 46-16, in favor of the Dutchmen.
In the second half, Lebanon Valley’s leading scorer, junior guard Riley Hevelow, shed her defender at the foul line and began driving toward what appeared to be a certain hoop.
Instead she passed. And saw the ball stolen.
Should have put it up, right?
“I know!” Hevelow said later, in mock horror. “I was just talking about that. I was like, ‘I should have just shot it.’ But it is what it is. It happens.”
The point here is that Reed and Hevelow were concerned not so much about the situation or the score – LVC went on to win, 59-33 – as they were doing the right thing. Or, in coachspeak, playing the right way. And that has indeed become the hallmark of this club, which enters this week’s MAC Freedom tournament as the No. 1 seed.
The Dutchmen play hard. They play together. And they seem to understand that seasons swing on moments great and small.
The biggest moment so far was Saturday’s 73-55 victory over Arcadia, which snapped a tie between the two teams atop the conference on the final day of the regular season. As a result the Dutchmen (19-6) will host No. 4 DeSales (15-10) in Wednesday’s semifinals. Win that, and they get the Arcadia-Stevens survivor in Saturday’s championship game, also at home. Win that, and they make NCAAs.
Not bad for a team that was picked to finish fourth in the preseason, after going 15-11 in 2023-24.
“You kind of don’t know how the season’s going to go,” said coach Diane Decker, who has seen her team improve each of the four seasons she has been in charge. “So I’m like, ‘OK, that’s fair. We’ll see what we do.’ And then I think as I saw how we were progressing, I’m like, ‘We’re not four. I knew we were a little bit better than that.’”
The players came to realize it, too.
“After the first couple games we got in the flow of things and we saw how things are going to go, and it all hit us,” said Reidinger, a junior forward. “And we’re like, ‘This is our year. We can do it.’”
They overcame Hevelow’s five-game absence in January with an ankle sprain. (Went 5-0, in fact.) They overcame two fourth-quarter collapses against Stevens, resulting in their lone Freedom defeats in 14 conference games. And here they are, winners of their last six games, and 12 of their last 13.
Defense has been their meal ticket. They have limited opponents to 22.5 percent 3-point shooting, which equals the ninth-best mark in all of NCAA Division III, and 32.5 percent shooting overall, which is tied for 21st.
“This is the first year,” Decker said, “where I feel my LVC team has really committed to defense, and they’re doing a phenomenal job. It’s kept us in every game. … They’re really locked in.”
And let’s be real here: Offense is fun. Defense is, ya know, drudgery.
“No one ever likes to play defense,” senior point guard Cristina Fernandez admitted, “but we make sure that defense comes first, before anything else.”
All part of their unified front. An impenetrable front, if you will. Decker believes this club has achieved another first, in that it is the first one she has had here that has “really connected.”
“They really like each other,” Decker said. “There’s not jealousy.”
As Kailey Eckhart, a junior forward from ELCO, put it, “I think we saw what didn’t work last year. And we know that we shouldn’t be selfish. We should just be on the same page.”
It shows on the stat sheet. Hevelow averages 15.5 points a game, while Reidinger is generating a near double-double – 13 points and 9.9 rebounds. Fernandez contributes 10.6 points and 5.2 boards a night. She has also compiled team-leading totals of 92 assists. And 56 steals. And 45 blocks – at 5-foot-7.
One other thing, too.
“She’s, like, our hype man,” said Eckhart, LVC’s fourth double-figure scorer (10.4) and top 3-point shooter (.383). “She’s always hyping us up and always energetic. And whenever somebody’s down, she’ll come up to us and she’ll get us going again. She’s, like, an energetic fireball.”
Decker and Reidinger likewise vouched for the power of Fernandez’s positivity. And true to form, she was cradling an unsent greeting card when she met with a reporter after the King’s game.
“Every day you have to come positive,” she said. “Even if you make mistakes, you just have to bounce back, because that’s just how basketball is.”
In Saturday’s finale Fernandez represented the first line of defense against Arcadia’s top scorer, Hanna Rhoades, though the Dutchmen – particularly Reed, a Manheim Central product, and another top perimeter defender, Jordan Zimmerman – dutifully switched every guard-guard screen.
Rhoades, effective off the bounce and from deep, still managed 19 points, two more than her average. But LVC’s D hung in there against a team that came in averaging 10 triples a game, the second-highest norm in D3.
The result? The Knights went 5-for-22 from the arc.
Asked later if she had an acceptable number in mind when it came to made 3s by Arcadia, Decker didn’t hesitate.
“Six,” she said. “That was the number.”
The game swung Lebanon Valley’s way for good when the Dutchmen held the Knights scoreless on 14 straight possessions beginning midway through the second quarter and extending into the third. LVC reeled off 12 points of its own during that nine-minute, 45-second stretch, widening the lead from 25-20 to 37-20, and was never seriously threatened again.
Hevelow scored 23. Reidinger had 13, along with 15 rebounds and six blocks. Fernandez, honored before the game with Zimmerman and fellow senior Elise Balmer (Warwick), did her usual multitasking – 14 points, eight rebounds, five assists and three blocks – and Reed scored 11.
In short, everybody did something. They had again played the right way, and been rewarded for it. That’s usually the case, especially at this time of year. Now it’s a matter of how far they can take this, — how much they can take advantage of each moment, whether great or small.
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