Staff photo / Neel Madhavan. Canfield senior Alyssa Dill (10) drives along the baseline under the basket while being guarded by Howland's Jamie DeSalvo Wednesday night.

CANFIELD — Entering Wednesday’s matchup, Alyssa Pompelia needed just five points to reach the 1,000-point plateau for her high school career, but Canfield wasn’t going to make it easy for the Howland senior.

The Cardinals threw the book at Pompelia defensively in the first half — face guarding her in man-to-man, while double teaming and trapping her whenever she touched the ball.

It took Pompelia and the Tigers a quarter to get going, but she finally reached the milestone in the second quarter — hitting a three off a screen for her 1,001st career point — as Howland made the necessary plays late to edge Canfield 40-38.

“I had a feeling they were going to face guard me or guard me harder than what I normally see because they’ve seen me play the past few games and I’ve dropped more points than I usually do,” Pompelia said. “My teammates really helped me get open with screens and decoy stuff.”

“It’s surreal. It means so much to me knowing that everything I’ve worked for, it’s finally paid off. Not many girls at Howland or even anyone in a Division I program can accomplish that, so just knowing I did means a lot.”

Pompelia becomes the eighth player in program history and the ninth player in school history to score at least 1,000 career points. Sara Price holds the Howland school record with 1,799 career points.

“The girls look to her — if there was a senior leader on this team, it’d be her,” Howland head coach Aaron Pounds said. “I have five seniors and they’re all leaders, but she’s certainly the head of the pack. She’s huge for these girls and they all look to her. We go as she goes.”

In a physical conference rivalry game, the defenses controlled the tempo and the pace of play for both teams.

Howland (9-5) didn’t record its first points of the game for almost five minutes in the first quarter, while Canfield (7-5) didn’t score for the first six minutes of the second quarter.

“We knew their zone trap is pretty good and with (Jamie) DeSalvo in the back, she can erase a lot of mistakes they do make,” Canfield head coach Matt Reel said. “Once we spread them out, we felt we had control a lot better, but their pressure really bothered us in the first half. Obviously we wanted to limit what Alyssa Pompelia could do, and it just comes down to us trusting our man-to-man defense. That’s our bread and butter and we were just trying to take away their best tendencies.”

The defensive play forced both coaches to find different ways to help their team score points.

“We talked to the girls and told them to be aggressive and crash the boards,” Pounds said. “We’re not going to make everything, but we have to attack the glass, whether they have the ball or not. Catch the ball and go downhill — attack the rim and try to draw the foul.”

After trailing by six at halftime, Canfield opened the second half on a 10-2 scoring run that helped them to crawl back into the game and eventually pull ahead with a two-lead by the end of the third quarter. Senior Alyssa Dill finished with 14 points to lead Canfield, while Abby Muckleroy added 11 for the Cardinals.

As the first three quarters were dictated by the defenses, the offenses finally started hitting in the final period, especially Howland’s.

With 2:39 left, the game was tied at 35. Then, DeSalvo scored her only points of the game on a putback off an offensive rebound, which put Howland ahead for good. The Tigers scored 15 points in the fourth quarter, including going 8-for-11 at the free-throw line as it closed out the win.

Canfield had several possessions and opportunities to tie or pull ahead in the final minutes, but just couldn’t find the bottom of the basket.

“I thought we had some really good looks, but I counted in my mind that we had six layups that we airballed from five feet or less and you can’t do that against a good team like Howland and still finish,” Reel said. “The difference was, they got those opportunities and put them in and we didn’t.”

nmadhavan@tribtoday.com