At Williams Arena<\/p>\n
March 13th<\/p>\n
A cursory look at the Class A Girls Basketball State Tournament bracket showed a semifinal meeting between the Nos. 2 and 6 seeds. A closer inspection revealed this matchup had much more potential than the seeds would have fans just tuning in believe.<\/p>\n
No. 2 Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s (31-1) reaching its first state title game required avenging its only loss of the regular season.<\/p>\n
Mission accomplished.<\/p>\n
The Knights ended the game on a 23-10 run to advance with a 53-47 victory over No. 6 Central Minnesota Christian (27-4) on Friday, March 13 at the University of Minnesota’s Williams Arena.<\/p>\n
Junior guard Morgan Mathiowetz shot 5-of-10 from three-point range and scored a game-high 32 points to up her 2026 state tournament total to 73. Her triple from the right wing increased a precarious three-point lead to six with 29 seconds remaining, essentially clinching a historic victory.<\/p>\n
“Just knowing my teammates trust me to take that shot,” Mathiowetz said of her conviction late in the shot clock. “I’m confident knowing I’ve taken that shot a million times in the gym before. It’s either a make and we stretch the lead or a miss and we get back on defense. It’s having that confidence and knowing (my teammates) have confidence in me, too.”<\/p>\n
Mathiowetz had 26 points in the teams’ first meeting on Jan. 31, but the Bluejays emerged victorious, 74-70. Central Minnesota Christian knocked off No. 3 Kelliher\/Northome in Thursday’s state quarterfinals to set up a rematch.<\/p>\n
“(Thursday) when we found out, we just knew that last time we played them in January, we knew we didn’t play our best basketball,” Mathiowetz said. “So, we knew we had that in our tank still and we just came out and stuck to our plan and gave it everything.<\/p>\n
“It feels pretty good to get our revenge here. Now that we’re going to the championship, it’s a lot bigger deal than maybe what it was in January. Obviously we learned a lot from that game. We stuck together and got it done.”<\/p>\n
The Knights held Central Minnesota Christian star guard Sienna Duininck \u2014 a 31-point scorer in their regular-season game \u2014 to 12 points Friday, including only two in the second half. Addie Taatjes and Emmi Braem also contributed 12 points for the Bluejays.<\/p>\n
No. 1 Mountain Iron-Buhl awaits Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s in the Class A final Saturday at noon. Central Minnesota Christian will play for third place against Hillcrest Lutheran Academy at Concordia University’s Gangelhoff Center in St. Paul.<\/p>\n2026-girls-basketball-class-a-semi-sesm-vs-cmc<\/a>\n2<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At Williams Arena March 13th A cursory look at the Class A Girls Basketball State Tournament bracket showed a semifinal meeting between the Nos. 2 and 6 seeds. A closer inspection revealed this matchup had much more potential than the seeds would have fans just tuning in believe. No. 2 Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s (31-1) …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":145587,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-st-marys-girls-basketball"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":true,"date":"2031-04-13 18:52:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[0],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145604"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145643,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145604\/revisions\/145643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}