Staff photo by Jeremy Behnke Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s Katelyn Rutscher takes a jumper against BOLD in the Section 2A, North Subsection finals on Tuesday. St. Mary’s advanced to Thursday’s Section 2A championship at Sibley East High School with the victory.

SLEEPY EYE — The final score didn’t show that Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s was tested, but the Knights did have a battle on their hands on Tuesday.

BOLD, the No. 2 team in the Section 2A, North Subsection, took a 23-20 lead with 7:30 left in the first half and later led 26-23. But the unbeaten Knights (21-0) didn’t panic, and instead turned that deficit into some motivation.

The Knights and Warriors traded leads and buckets for the first half, but the Knights finished the half with a 10-0 run to go into halftime leading 46-36.

They didn’t let up in the second half, cruising to a 94-59 victory to advance to Thursday’s Section 2A championship game at Sibley East High School.

The Knights will take on Waterville-Elysian-Morristown, the defending Section 2A champs, at 7 p.m. on Thursday. St. Mary’s defeated WEM late in the season before the playoffs began.

The Warriors were hot offensively in the first half. St. Mary’s coach Bruce Woitas challenged his team to get better on the defensive end, and they did.

“They were just making a big amount of their shots and coach Woitas just told us to pick up the defense,” St. Mary’s senior Sydney Windschitl said. “We just had to limit their points in the paint.”

At one point, it seemed like everything BOLD was shooting was going in. The Knights turned to Windschitl and junior Madison Mathiowetz, and the two didn’t disappoint. Mathiowetz finished with a game-high 40 points and Windschitl tallied 31 points. Mathiowetz also had 14 rebounds, six steals and five assists while Windschitl had six rebounds, four steal and two assists. Reagan Severson also had 7 points and two steals.

“Obviously that’s a part of basketball, it’s a game of runs,” Mathiowetz said. “Obviously this year, we haven’t had a lot of those games, but when we have, I think we’ve weathered the storm really well. We just know that we know how to play the game and we know how we can score on offense and that we need to get stops on defense, if we just keep our cool and get there, then we’ll know that we’ll get through that run and we’ll get hot again.”

The Warriors did give the Knights a challenge in the paint with their height and physicality. But in the end, the Knights pulled away because they had more energy at the end.

The 10-0 run changed the momentum of the game heading into the locker room. After that, BOLD wasn’t able to match the Knights basket-for-basket and the Knights kept scoring.

“It was a huge momentum changer for us,” Windschitl said. “We had a lot of energy coming out of the second half and that really changed the game for us.”

As impressive as the 46-point effort was in the first half for the Knights, they managed to score 48 in the second half.

“I think they [BOLD] shot exceptionally well the first half and I know they hit five 3s, everything they hit was going in,” Woitas said. “We struggled with some things defensively in the first half and gave them some easy looks, but our kids just battled.

“I think BOLD got a little bit fatigued, they were shut down for a while before the playoffs because of COVID stuff, and that probably affected them, but credit our kids, we wanted to repeat as subsection champs and our kids really responded to that in the second half.”

Mari Ryberg led BOLD with 13 points and Lainey Braulick finished with 12 points. Abby Meyers had 10 for the Warriors, who end their season at 10-5.

Because of the COVID restrictions this year, the Subsection finals were played at the high seed, rather than at a college facility such as Gustavus Adolphus College like it usually is. This definitely helped the Knights.

“It was awesome, it was a huge advantage for us, but we’re not done yet,” Windschitl said.