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Holmen High School senior Maria Mackey helped the Division 1 North team to a 81-64 win in the Wisconsin Basketball Coaches Association state all-star series Saturday at Madison Area Technical College.

Mackey scored six points, hitting two of her three attempts from three-point range. She missed all three of her attempts from inside the arc.

“It was really fun,” Mackey said. “Everyone was a really good player, and no one real stuck out, except for (Eau Claire North graduate and UW-Green Bay recruit) Hannah Quilling. It was harder to play but fun at the same time.”

Mackey will attend and join her older brother Mike, a 2007 Holmen graduate, in playing basketball at Northland College in Ashland. The North was coached by HHS head coach Duane Vike.

“Maria played good defensively,” Vike said. “Your worry about her athletically in a game like that, but she did fine.”

Vike said the roster included seven scholarship players, including Logan graduate and Wisconsin-Milwaukee recruit Danielle Jorgensen. The roster also included state shot put champion Hedi Baerenwald of Appleton.

“Quilling is really special player,” Vike said. “Jorgensen rebounded well and defended well.”

Part of playing in the game is that each player must raise $400 for the MACC Fund, Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer. The MACC Fund was founded by Jon McGlocklin, a starting guard on the Milwaukee Bucks 1971 world championship team, and former longtime Bucks announcer Eddie Doucette after Doucette's son, Brett, was diagnosed with cancer at the time of McGlocklin's retirement in 1976. Brett Doucette is now married and lives in California.

As part of the partnership between the WBCA and the MACC Fund in recent years, players in the all-star games visit with children stricken with cancer. That didn't happen directly this year, Mackey said, so the children's weakened immune systems wouldn't be susceptible to further weakening. Instead, Mackey said, they heard from two speakers, including a recent Madison high school graduate who contracted cancer last year and is now cancer-free.

“I took away from that not to take anything for granted,” Mackey said. “I've got a pretty good life, but you don't realize that sometimes.”