| Advertisement |
|
|
Outside of the first four minutes of the final game the opening day of the 2012 Chapman Fighting Irish basketball classic was nick and tuck the entire day.
Outside of those four minutes, which were dominated by the homestanding Chapman Fighting Irish, the four teams played to within seven points of each other and one of the four games needed an additional four minutes to determine the winner.
On the opening day of the 1st annual tournament the Sacred Heart Lady Knights needed that extra frame to turn back El Dorado 36-34, the El Dorado Wildcat boys edged out a 46-45 win over Sacred Heart and the Lady Bulldogs of Rossville rallied in the fourth quarter to earn a 45-41 win over Chapman.
Then came those four minutes when the Chapman Irish boys came out determined from their locker room while the Rossville Bulldogs must have missed the starting time of the game.
Chapman ran off a 13-0 run in those four key minutes and that 13-point edge was the determining factor in Chapman’s ultimate 45-32 victory in the final game of the day.
"We really hit the ground running," said Chapman boys’ coach Tony Ingram. "That is what kind of spurred us because that 13 or 14 point lead is what we held for the remainder of the game. It would have been a much closerr game down the stretch had it not been for that first three or four minutes."
For Rossville girls’ head coach, Jim Channel, he was happy to see the nick and tuck affair.
"For me, I’d rather have them tight anway because a lot of times when they are not tight like that, we are down quite a bit," Channel said. "It helps you learn, we had a lot of freshman on the floor there at the end so these tight games help us learn quite a bit."
The day opened with the overtime battle between the Sacred Heart and El Dorado girls. In that contest Sacred Heart’s Megan Gilliland buried a 3-pointer from the top of the key to knot the score at 30-30 with 31 seconds remaining in regulation. Neither team scored a bucket in those final 31 seconds and the game went to the extra four-minute frame.
In that extra four minutes, El Dorado hit the first bucket to jump in front but Sacred Heart scored the game’s next six points and then the Lady Knights held on for the four-point victory.
In the game Sacred Heart was led by Cara Donley’s 11 points while Tracie Thibault added 10 points. El Dorado’s Andrea Valedez was El Dorado’s lone double digit scorer but she led all scorers in the game with 13 points.
"I think we played the way we needed to play," Sacred Heart coach Mark Ramsey said. "We needed to win the free throw contest type of thing and we needed to keep our turnovers down … luckily we got out with the win. We made some big free throws and we made the key stops when we needed them."
The El Dorado vs. Sacred Heart boys’ game was back-and-forth throughout the entire contest with Sacred Heart outscoring El Dorado 12-10 in the first quarter, El Dorado edging the Knights by 3 (13-10) in the second quarter and the two teams battled to a 23-23 tie in the second half, but that one-point edge by El Dorado in the second quarter gave the Wildcats the overall edge.
Dalton Dooley led Sacred Heart in scoring with 13 points while Tate Richards added 11 for the Knights. El Dorado had three different players score in double figures, led by Travis House’s 15 points while Trevor Crain added 13 and Jared Haury pitched in 11.
"I think we had two teams that played hard and two teams that played well at times and two teams that didn’t play well at times," El Dorado Wildcat boys’ head coach Gary Melcher said. "We had a couple of late stops in the game … but for the first game I was very happy with our defense."
The final game of the day did not turn into the tight battle the first three did because Chapman came out on fire and built a 13-0 lead with 3:56 remaining in the opening quarter.
Chapman maintained that lead throughout the remainder of the game but El Dorado did not simply allow Chapman to pour it on them any further.
El Dorado picked up its first points of the game with 3:20 remaining in the opening quarter, but that bucket was the Wildcats only points in the first quarter as Chapman built an 18-2 lead after the first period and led 26-13 at intermission, 32-20 after three quarters and finished off with the 13-point win.
"Rossville picked up their intensity a little bit," Ingram said. "We just couldn’t break away and put together two or three baskets … we just couldn’t find that run to really pull away from them."
Chapman was led in scoring by Kyle Anderson’s 14 points while Zach Heiman added 10. Rossville was led by Austin Greco’s 9 points.
The round robin, four-team, tournament, is scheduled to resume in Chapman on Friday when Sacred Heart will play Rossville and El Dorado will play Chapman. The tournament is scheduled to conclude on Saturday when Rossville plays El Dorado and Sacred Heart plays Chapman.