Photo by Jake McNeill: Marshall forwards Avery Schneekloth (far right) and Paige Gillingham as Reese Drake (2) and Danielle Nubile (23) look on after Marshall's loss to Benilde-St. Margaret's in the Class AAA championship game on Saturday at Williams Arena in Minneapolis.

MINNEAPOLIS — Taking on the two-time reigning state champions on Saturday afternoon, the second-seeded Marshall Tigers were unable to prevent No. 1 Benilde-St. Margaret’s from claiming the threepeat. The Tigers scored the first points of the game but the Red Knights led the rest of the way, as Marshall’s season came to an end with a 73-57 loss in the Class AAA Championship game.

Benilde-St. Margaret’s is a team that the Tigers had kept an eye on all season, Marshall head coach Dan Westby said, adding that he felt the Red Knights played their best basketball of the year down the stretch and that they came in hungry and ready to play.

“This has been a fun group. I’ve coached 36 years, so according to my Danube math, that’s 72 seasons, and there’s not a better group than this in all those seasons I’ve been able to coach,” Westby said. “I’ve always enjoyed watching them. We said the other day that whoever the opponent was, just say, ‘Okay, what do we have to do?’ and get themselves ready to go… I haven’t had to brow-beat them. They’ve been great.”

The Tigers head home with a state runner-up trophy, their fifth since their last state title in 2002, as well as three All-Tournament honorees. The junior trio of Reese Drake, Taleigha Bigler and Avery Fahl was selected to the team.

“It probably hasn’t hit yet that the season’s over, but it’s been a really fun season. This team has been special to play with,” Bigler said.

“We’ve done a lot of good things and we’re a very close team, so I think we fell a little short this time. But we’ll be ready to get after it next year,” Drake added.

Benilde-St. Margaret’s won the game’s opening tip, but Bigler stole the ball on the perimeter and went right to the rim for a layup and the game’s first points. Yet, the Red Knights responded with 7 unanswered points and rode that early momentum uninterrupted for the remainder of the game.

Bigler went on to finish the night as the game’s leading scorer, contributing 19 points on 5 of 13 shooting from the field. Her biggest strength, however, was her ability to draw contact; Bigler drew eight fouls for 10 free-throw attempts, making nine of them.

Fahl also contributed 15 points on 5 of 9 shooting from the field. Eight of her attempts came from 3-point land; the rest of the team shot a combined 3 of 14 from beyond the arc.

Facing a 12-point deficit with three minutes left in the first half, the Tigers did what they could in order to recapture some momentum before halftime. A Fahl 3-pointer, a Danielle Nubile jumper and a pair of Bigler free throws gave Marshall 7 unanswered points.

Sydney Friedly broke up the Marshall run with a 3-pointer, but Nubile converted through contact for a layup to trim the Red Knights’ lead to 35-29 at halftime.

Nubile was one of two Tigers to finish the game making more than half of her field goal attempts, along with Fahl. Nubile went 3 of 3 in the first half but was scoreless in the second.

“She showed us something today,” Westby said of Nubile. “We came into this tournament planning on playing her, and it just felt like the time was never right. This is the first action she’s seen in the tournament and I thought she gave us a nice spark there heading into the half.”

To start the second half, Pressley Watkins and Kendall McGee hit consecutive 3-pointers to bring the Red Knights’ lead up to 12 points. Just when it seemed like Marshall would be able to make a run, with Schneekloth, Bigler and Fahl hitting consecutive shots to trim the deficit to 5 points, Benilde-St. Margaret’s responded with 13 unanswered.

McGee led the Red Knights with 17 points on 8 of 15 shooting while Zahara Bishop added another 16 on 7 of 15 shooting. Friedly and Watkins also contributed 13 points each, with Friedly doing so on red-hot 5 of 7 shooting. Each of the four players was selected to the all-tournament team.

“You’ve got to pick your poison with some of their kids on what you want to do [defensively],” Westby said. “If you close out too hard on some of those kids, they’re going to blow by you and get to the basket. When that happens, somebody else has to come over and help, and that leaves somebody open under the basket. There were a couple times in the second half where they ended up cashing in some easy layups because of that.”

Points in the paint were the story of the game for Benilde-St. Margaret’s in the game. The Red Knights outscored Marshall 42-22 inside, while also outshooting Marshall in terms of 3-point efficiency. Benilde-St. Margaret’s made 7 of its 16 attempts from long range while Marshall made 8 of 22.

“They played a zone, and we practiced a bunch of zones, but just different defense,” Fahl said of the Red Knights. “They’re really good players. Just scrappy, all over the place, so we had to keep moving the ball and cutting just to try to get around that.”

Bigler added that she felt Benilde-St. Margaret’s length disrupted the Tigers’ passing lanes.

Marshall never came back within single digits of Benilde-St. Margaret’s. The tournament’s top seed led by as many as 21 points in the game, claiming a 71-50 lead with five minutes remaining.

The Tigers trimmed their early deficit down to 2 points after a Drake 3 and a pair of Bigler free throws made the score 13-11 five minutes into the game. Again, Benilde-St. Margaret re-extended its lead with 6 unanswered points, prompting a Marshall timeout trailing 19-11 with 10 minutes remaining.

Drake dished out a game-high six assists with seven turnovers for Marshall, while Schneekloth dished out four assists on one turnover. Drake also scored 11 points in the game.

At the time of Marshall’s timeout, the Tigers were being outscored 12-6 in the paint and 6-0 in points off the bench.

Bigler knocked down a layup after Marshall’s timeout to interrupt the Benilde-St. Margaret’s scoring run and Fahl knocked down a 3 to trim the Tiger deficit to 5 points. Yet, another 6-0 scoring run for the Red Knights gave Benilde-St. Margaret’s its first double-digit lead, 27-16, with 5:15 left in the first half.

Rebounding had been a struggle for the Tigers in the first two rounds of the tournament, but Marshall’s efforts on the glass improved for the championship game. Marshall built up an 11-9 edge on the offensive glass but were outscored 8-6 in second-chance points. Westby said rebounding was the Tigers’ top priority heading into the game and felt that his team did improve despite the matchup challenges the Red Knights present.

In the final minute, the Tigers and Red Knights both made mass substitutions to take out their starters and run out the waning minutes of the clock.

With a winter weather warning in Lyon County, the commute from Marshall to Williams Arena deterred many from the community from making the 154-mile trek. As such, Benilde-St. Margaret’s had a notable home-court advantage with the high school being 8.5 miles from the Arena.

“We knew our crowd was going to be maybe not what it could have been, had the weather not been so bad back home,” Westby said.

Marshall finishes its season at 29-2 and as the Class AAA state runner-up. Each of the Tigers’ two losses this season came against teams out of Section 6, as the lone other defeat came at the hands of Section 6AAA runner-up Orono on Feb. 1.

The Tigers graduate two seniors in Gillingham and Pederson.

“The thing that stands out probably more than anything, thinking of those two, is just their loyalty,” Westby said of his seniors. “In this day and age, that’s rare with all the moving around of players and that sort of things, it’s hard to find girls that are loyal. Those two have been great with all the summer stuff we do, summer workouts and so on. Those guys are right there and they’ve been great leaders.”