COLUMBIANA — The Columbiana Clippers made a crucial attitude adjustment this past week. Having a week off allowed them to refocus following a disappointing three-game losing streak to finish the regular season.

“It was actually nice not to have a game,” Clippers coach David Crismon said. “We really had to spend some time on some things we weren’t doing well. Then it was basically challenging our team if they wanted it to be over or not.

“At this point, I look at it as a brand-new season. I have to take my hat off to our seniors who chose to rise up to that challenge and rallied everyone. I knew last night and this morning that they were ready.”

The third-seeded Clippers, who improve to 17-7, responded with a 54-43 victory over the sixth-seeded Ursuline Irish in a Division III sectional bracket final Saturday afternoon. They will play second-seeded South Range in a district semifinal at the Struthers Fieldhouse at 6 p.m. Wednesday. The Irish closed their season with a 9-15 mark.

The game was much different than the first encounter between the programs in early December.

In that contest, the Irish prevailed by a 49-30 score.

“Our coaches talked about that feeling when we walked out of their gym and how we felt,” Clippers junior guard Grace Witmer said. “We wanted to make them feel how we felt when we walked out of there. It was our time to show what we were made of.”

“We knew we didn’t play our best,” Clippers sophomore guard Tori Long added. “We knew we were better than what we showed and we wanted to come out and show them who we are,”

“We knew Columbiana was a good team and maybe they had a bad game and we had a good game,” Irish coach Michael Kernan said about that previous meeting. “We knew coming into today, that game didn’t mean much. In general, two good teams, one day going good for somebody and the next day it’s going good for the other.”

The Clippers started the contest with a 17-6 run before the Irish responded with a 4-0 run in the final two minutes of the opening quarter to make it 17-10 at the close of the period. The Clippers built an 11-point, 27-16 lead with 2:57 remaining in the half when senior guard Kayla Muslovski knocked down a basket, matching their early first-quarter advantage.

“It was huge,” Long said about the importance of a good start. “It is our goal to get to the district and we knew we had to come out on fire.”

“Ursuline is a nemesis, for a lot of teams. But for Columbiana, they have eliminated us at district level, sectional level, and I don’t care how young they are or how much their rebuilding, it’s still Ursuline,” Crismon said. “So once we established that we could score, I knew that start would help propel us.”

But the Irish battled back as they responded with a 9-5 run to make it just a 7-point deficit at intermission with the score 32-25. Junior forward Anisah Moorman connected on a layup with just four seconds remaining in the half to help the Irish close the gap.

However, the Clippers seized the momentum again to start the second half with Witmer and Karissa Tringhese hitting 3-pointers, followed by Muslovski converting a steal into a basket to push the Clippers’ lead to a game-high 14-points at 40-26 with 5:30 left in the third frame. The Clippers held a 43-34 lead at the end of the quarter.

Crismon explained why the fast start to the second half was so key.

“You know the other team is going to be desperate. They are going to come after you. We rattled off four to six straight points and it wasn’t on me, it was on them (Clippers team). That was the story of the game,” he said.

Cara McNally of the Irish hit a 3-pointer just 17 seconds into the fourth quarter to pull the Irish back to within 6 of the Clippers at 43-37. But the Clippers close the game outscoring the Irish 11-6 to win by the final 11-point margin.

“We have a pretty good 3-point shooting team,” Kernan said. “I felt that if we were within two or three shots, we’re in the game. We didn’t feel it was a huge difference, but we just never really strung it all together.

“Any time we made some sort of little run they answered with a shot, and we were just never were able to put things back to back or string things together. It just never happened.”