It’s been seven years since a Recorder-area team reached a girls basketball sectional final, and 19 years since one brought home a title. All told, just seven local teams in our history have lifted hardware at the end of the WMass girls hoop tournament.
Simply put, it’s not easy to win in March.
That’s why Greenfield High School’s journey to this afternoon’s Division 3 final marks the culmination of a special season. The No. 4 Green Wave knocked off top-seeded South Hadley in Wednesday’s semifinal round, putting the program into its first title game since 1990. They’ll play perennial powerhouse Hoosac Valley, which has won WMass titles in five of the past six years.
The eyes of the local basketball community are now squarely focused on Greenfield, as the last local team still left standing following a busy winter season. There should be plenty of faces from a variety of communities in the crowd this afternoon, when the teams tip off at 2:15 p.m. at Curry Hicks Cage on the campus of UMass.
“Basketball’s a sport that I think everyone respects and everyone likes, so they see an opportunity to watch good basketball, they take it,” Greenfield senior forward Samantha Smith said of the support her team has received from fans throughout Franklin County. “I see so many people that I don’t even know who come up and say they love watching us and following us. It’s cool that people all over (Franklin County) know who we are.”
The Wave are seeking the Recorder area’s eighth sectional championship in girls basketball. That history dates all the way back to 1983, when Frontier beat Turners Falls, 52-31, to win the Division 3 title. It was the first of five WMass crowns for the program, the most of any local team on the girls’ side. Frontier won three straight titles between 1986-1988, knocking off St. Joseph’s (49-44 win in ’86), Hopkins Academy (34-27, ’87) and Lee (42-40, ’88). The program’s most recent championship came in 2000, when the squad edged Hopkins again, this time thanks to a 38-36 final.
Frontier has the most finals appearances in Recorder history, reaching 12 title games (5-7 record). They were an unfortunate casualty of the dominant streak put together by Lee High School in the 1990s. The Wildcats beat Frontier in the title game five times in a seven-year span from 1991-1997.
Athol High School is the other program to have success in the WMass tourney, as the Red Raiders have won two Division 2 sectional championships in their history. The first-ever came back in 1985, when Athol got past Monument Mountain, 45-41, and the Raiders did it again two years later in 1987 with a 67-54 win over the same Monument club. The two teams played in the WMass finals four years in a row in fact, from 1984-1987, splitting the four meetings.
The rivalry between Athol and Monument was renewed a decade later, when the teams met for back-to-back Div. 2 championships in 1998 and 1999. The Spartans took control of the series with wins in both matchups, edging Athol 49-46 in ’98 before capturing a 64-47 win one year later.
That put the Red Raiders 2-4 in WMass finals all time.
Pioneer Valley Regional School ranks third in title-game appearances on the girls side. The Panthers are 0-2 in their two trips, falling to Lee in back-to-back Division 3 finals in 1998 (52-41) and 1999 (57-47).
Greenfield’s lone appearance prior to today’s game came in 1990, a 65-34 loss to Southwick in the Div. 2 title game. Mahar Regional School reached its first and only final in 2012, when the Senators fell to Palmer, 53-37, in the Div. 2 title game, while Turners Falls’ lone championship-game appearnace in 1983 resulted in the loss to Frontier.