National champion Trinity Lutheran girls basketball team relies on stifling 'D'

The adage 'Defense wins championships' can be applied universally.

It's a motto of 300-pound grown men in the National Football League. A cornerstone among toothless journeymen of the National Hockey League.

It even has its devout followers among girls sporting braces in eighth-grade basketball.

Trinity Lutheran of Cape Girardeau has been testing the concept with a point-denying match-up zone -- and reaping the rewards.

The fruits of their diligence are evident before reaching the front door of the school situated at 55 N. Pacific. Handmade signs planted in the lawn congratulate the Panthers, and the windows serve as a billboard with "2012 National Girls Basketball Champions" painted proudly in blue.

The Panthers used a balanced offense and a defense that allowed just 13.7 points per game in a 28-1 campaign.

"Sometimes we don't score as much as most teams, but we'll hold teams [down]," said the Panthers' Logan Welker.

Trinity recently took its smothering brand of basketball to the 32-team Lutheran Basketball Association of America National Tournament of Champions in Valparaiso, Ind., and silenced the competition with a 5-0 run to the title. The Panthers posted three wins against state champions. They allowed just 15 points to the four-time defending Texas state champion, which was last year's national runner-up, 18 points to rival St. Paul of neighboring Jackson, the Missouri state champion, in the semifinals, and 18 points to the Indiana state champion in the final.

While those three opponents combined for 51 points, the Panthers countered with 121.

The national title, the first by a Missouri school, was the goal the group had set its eyes on since finishing fifth at the national tournament in 2011 with a team that was comprised almost solely of seventh-graders. Trinity, which won the Missouri state championship in 2011, was the only team in this year's national tournament that returned all five starters from the previous year. It was a team that gave eventual 2011 national champion Wisconsin its closest game, which came in the quarterfinals.

Maddie Brune, Tess Daniel, Ali Galemmo, Welker and Raegan Wieser all started as seventh-graders. Daniel and Wieser, who made the 10-girl all-American team named after the tournament, have started since sixth grade and have been on the team since fifth grade.

"[We had] a lot more confidence," said Daniel, the team's point guard and second-leading scorer. "Just being there before and knowing we did good last year, too, and wanting to do better than getting fifth like we did last year."

The Panthers' brand of basketball has been longer in the making.

Assistant coach Rick Wieser started coaching his daughter Raegan Wieser, Daniel and Welker on a second-grade team. Panthers coach John Daniel added Brune to the mix as a fifth-grader and Galemmo as a sixth-grader. Madison Arbuckle, Alaina Childers and Courtney Kester also were added into what turned out to be a championship mix.

"We were able to instill in them at this young age that 90 percent of the time we don't have the ball," John Daniel said. "So you've got to learn to be a great player when you don't have the ball. Therefore they grasp how much time we wanted to spend on defense. And they don't know any better. They think practice is supposed to be about defense and rebounding because that's all they've ever done."

The five starters all are on the A honor roll.

"All five of them could play any position on defense and all five of them could play any position on offense because they were smart," John Daniel said. "We could do a lot of things because they were smart and got along."

The final win over Indiana exemplified a maturity possessed by the mostly 13- and 14-year-olds, who had to contend with a large, biased crowd that had a shorter drive to see the home-state team.

It's a situation that can be unnerving.

"When you're warming up and you see them all, you kind of feel like that," Galemmo said. "But once the game starts, you forget it all."

Trinity pleased its small band of supporters by taking a 9-7 lead into the second quarter, then held the Indiana state champs scoreless until halftime for a 19-7 lead. The Panthers took a 34-15 into the fourth quarter but weren't quite ready to celebrate.

"We don't like to assume anything," said Brune, who said she didn't allow herself to begin feeling like a national champion until about three minutes were left in the 40-18 rout.

"We were up by so much and we looked at the clock and we realized that we were the national champions," Brune said. "It was amazing when it soaks in and you realize that a team from Cape Girardeau [has won]."

Indiana's top player was limited to seven points in the title game -- all in the first quarter. The girl finished second in the all-American voting, and the Panthers also held two other all-American players to two and four points in the tournament.

"Most teams will have one good offensive player, and our gals were so good on defense they'd shut that girl down, and they wouldn't know what to do after that," John Daniel said.

Trinity did not have that make-up, which it demonstrated in the final. Raegan Wieser, the team's leading scorer and tallest player at 5 foot 9, did not score in the first half, but the Panthers thrived.

Trinity's lone loss of the season came at the hands of St. Paul in the Missouri state championship game. The Panthers avenged that loss with a pair of 13-point victories, one in the final of the SEMO Parochial League tournament and the other in the national semifinals.

St. Paul, which finished third in the national tournament, also handed Trinity one of its two losses in 2011.

"Coach [Daniel] always says that was the best thing that ever could have happened to us," Brune said about the losses to St. Paul.

Raegan Wieser also gives the losses and St. Paul an assist in the Panthers' success at the national tournament.

"Last year we lost to them and we picked up our practices and started working harder because we didn't want to lose to them again," Raegan Wieser said. "And after we lost to them in state [this year], especially because state is such a big thing, our practices just got more intense."

Trinity got the better of its Lutheran neighbor in five of the six meeting this year and in four of five games in 2011.

Four of the St. Paul players joined Trinity's starting five on an undefeated team coached by Daniel and Wieser last summer. It's led to a closeness among the players from the two schools that only is interrupted by whistles.

"You go into those games thinking, right now for the next hour, they are our worst enemy," Brune said with a smile. "And after that, then they can be our friends again."

St. Paul is the only school in the country that can boast a win over the national champion.

"There's 975 Lutheran schools in the country, and in my opinion the best two are in Cape Girardeau County," John Daniel said.

The players from Trinity and St. Paul only figure to get closer. They all plan to attend Saxony Lutheran High School next year.