File photo by Ari Selvey The Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s girls basketball team celebrates their victory over BOLD in the Section 2A Girls Basketball Tournament championship this past Friday at the Minnesota State University, Mankato’s Bresnan Arena.

MINNEAPOLIS — Sleepy Eye St. Marys’ trip to the state tournament is going to be a lot more familiar this year.

Not only did the Knights gain a lot of experience in last year’s tournament run, but they will also be facing an opponent they’ve played frequently in nonconference games over the past several seasons in seventh-seeded Mayer Lutheran.

The Knights open the Class A State Girls Basketball Tournament against the Crusaders at 3 p.m. Thursday at Maturi Pavilion.

“It’s been a while since we haven’t played them in nonconference,” St. Mary’s head coach Bruce Woitas said. “We played them in 2021 in the state quarterfinals and beat them and we played them in 2022 in the section finals and lost. We kind of know each other, and in some regards, they’re kind of a tough matchup because they present that size of being 5-10, 5-11 at pretty much every position. Just being familiar with them is a plus. We know what their expectations are going to be and what they’re going to try to do.

“We have to play well, and if we do that, we give ourselves and good opportunity to win. It should be a really competitive game. The last eight or so times that we’ve matched up in our nonconference games, they’ve all been really competitive games.”

St. Mary’s most recently matched up with Mayer Lutheran this season on Dec. 11, 2025, where St. Mary’s came away with a 52-49 win at home.

“Obviously they’ve improved a lot, and we’ve improved a lot,” Woitas said. “We’ve just got to do what we do well, and that’s good defensive pressure. We may have to adjust a few things defensively based on their size. They will look to take advantage of some post-up opportunities as they’ve done in the past, and we’ll talk about that. Overall we’ll just have to play our game. We’ve been working on some things offensively to bring their bigs out of the middle a little bit to open up some opportunities that way.

“It’s a chess match when you get here. They’re going to be making some adjustments based on what they think we’re going to do because they know us pretty well as well, and same thing on the reverse side. It should be a good, fun matchup. You go back to December, which was a long time ago, the very first part of the season. They were coming off of a volleyball championship. I think they had three of their five losses that came in that first part of the season. They’ve been playing good basketball, we’ve been playing good basketball.”

Woitas said the team may use more zone defense against Mayer Lutheran to help combat its size.

“We like to play a lot of man to man, we might have to switch up and play more zone and things like that,” Woitas said. “Obviously they’ll probably look for some mismatches to post up our players on the inside because they have that height pretty much consistently across the board. We’re just going to have to work on doubling down and stuff like that. If we do play some zone, they do a really good job of being patient offensively.

“They like to throw over the top a lot, and they’re able to do that because of their size. So it’s really going to come down to if we can play a good defensive game and limit them at their opportunities. Rebounding is going to be a really big key for us in that game on Thursday as well. We can’t give them those second and third opportunities on each possession.”

St. Mary’s comes into the tournament as the No. 2 seed and hopes to build on its fourth-place finish in last year’s tournament.

“I think it’s going to be a big help,” Woitas said. “We’ve got pretty much everyone that played last year. We’ve got a few new kids that are dressing that maybe didn’t have that experience, but we just lost the one senior, so all these kids pretty much know what this stage is about. Mayer Lutheran is a very experienced team in the state tournament as well, they were there last year and in previous years as well.

“They’ve been to the state tournament quite often. There’s probably going to be some nerves and jitters for both teams, but overall you’ve just got to show up and do what you’ve been doing all year long and play the game that you love, the game of basketball.

St. Mary’s lead scorer, Morgan Mathiowetz, said the team is better prepared mentally for this year’s tournament.

“I think last year we didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “It was basically all of our first times going there, so I think this year we’re hungry to go back and do better than we did last year. You never know what can happen, you can always get beat and you can always beat a team, so we need to be ready to go and stick to our plan and stick together.”

Mathiowetz is averaging 33.8 points per game, along with 7.0 rebounds, 6.1 assists and 6.2 steals this season. Olivia Schieffert has averaged 19.3 points, 4.6 rebounds, 4.7 assists and 3.4 steals, while Brynne Ibberson has added 6 points per game and Natalie Fischer averages 5.9 points per game.

The Knights have been able to put together a strong regular season schedule this year and have already faced two other state tournament teams besides Mayer Lutheran in New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva and Central Minnesota Christian. Woitas said that schedule has helped them prepare for the quality of team they will face in the state tournament.

“We had some high expectations, and we wanted to toughen up our nonconference schedule,” Woitas said. “We added St. James, we added St. Peter High School, we got New Richland on the schedule who’s a state tournament team. We played them at their place late in the year, so that was good prep for this and actually won that game. We were actually down in that game by 8 or 10 and actually won. We played Central Minnesota Christian at the end of January and that’s our one loss, a 4-point game.

“I thought we did a good job of adding some better competition in our nonconference schedule,” Woitas said. “It’s good prep for us and I think our kids responded well. Any time you can play a little bit stronger schedule in your nonconference schedule, it’s only going to help you in this time of year and I think those things have helped us in that regard.”