Lady Mounts net playoff spot

Ephrata’s girls basketball team got a little redemption on Friday night.

One year after a toughluck 0-6 finish to go from first place to completely out of the postseason, the Mountaineers finished the job.

Gabi Gerola-Hill scored 14 points, Jocelyn Umana chipped in with 11 points, and she and Carly Holochuck had clutch fourth-quarter buckets as host Ephrata rallied past Warwick 4843 to wrap up a spot in the Lancaster-Lebanon League playoffs.

“We knew that if we didn’t win this one, we’d have to count on other people to win and lose,” Umana said. “So we wanted to win it and secure our spot in the playoffs.”

Ephrata (6-4 Section Two, 7-12 overall) is now alone in second place behind Elizabethtown (8-2, 13-5), which has also locked up an L-L playoff bid. Warwick (47, 6-11) needed a victory to tie the Mounts in the win column. If the Warriors win out and if Ephrata drops its final three games, they’d both finish 6-7.

But the Mounts locked up the spot because they own the first tiebreaker: A 2-0 head-to-head record against Warwick this season. Ephrata edged the Warriors 3837 on Jan. 8, then overcame a 43-36 fourthquarter deficit on Friday to punch their ticket to the L-L bracket.

“The kids knew this was a big game,” Ephrata coach Brian Cerullo said. “Our kids have been through a lot in the last couple of weeks. It’s been an emotional couple of weeks for them. And they knew what happened last year. But they also knew that they could turn it around.”

Ephrata got the quick jump on Friday, grabbing an 18-12 firstquarter lead behind Gerola-Hill, who scored seven points, and Hannah Plowmaker, who had three post buckets and five rebounds in the first eight minutes. Lauren Pyle popped in a pair of second-quarter 3-pointers for Warwick, which finally warmed to the task and cut the Mounts’ lead to 28-25 at the half.

Warwick knotted the game at 33-33 on Reagan Longridge’s threepoint play with 2:57 to go in the third, but Ephrata still led, 36-35, heading into the final quarter. The Warriors hit the floor running in the fourth, using an 8-0 blitz to take a 43-36 lead on Pyle’s trey. Earlier, Longridge’s triple gave Warwick its first lead, 38-36, on the Warriors’ first trip of the fourth quarter.

Pyle piled up 20 points for Warwick.

“Momentum was going the wrong way for us,” Cerullo said. “We needed to force turnovers and get some transitions buckets, and we did.”

Ephrata finished fast. Holochuck’s short jumper gave the Mounts the lead for good, 4543 with 2:11 to go, after Umana’s steal and bucket tied it. Umana iced it with a last-second bucket off an inbound pass, as Ephrata feasted on eight fourth-quarter turnovers.

“We got a little passive there at the end when they brought the pressure,” Warwick coach Danny Cieniewicz said. “It allowed them to get back in the game in a hurry. That’s what kind of did us in there. They took the momentum and they rode it.”

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