By RYAN WALKER
PONETO — The Southern Wells basketball season didn’t finish the way Raider fans wanted it to — the Southwood Knights (8-14) blitzed the hosting Raiders (8-15) in the sectional quarterfinal 81-50 Tuesday night.
Similar to the two teams’ meeting on Dec. 19, the Knights jumped on the Raiders early and quickly, causing a mass of turnovers.
It was a 10-0 run in the first three minutes of the game, already prompting a timeout by head coach Joel Roush to get his group organized. But the full-court press mixed with a mismatch of size and speed, the Knights continued to pounce.
The Raiders had 17 turnovers in the first half, as a 21-8 first quarter bled over to a 42-19 by the break. Southwood scored almost all of its shots on two-point baskets or free throws — the one that wasn’t was a three-pointer by Emery Liddick.
“We haven’t gotten off to very good starts all year. I think it speaks to the quality of Southwood,” Roush said after the game. “The skill, the talent, the cohesion. If you come out nervous or tentative against a team like that, they’re going to bury you, and they did.”
Bryce Wilcox, a 6’6” sophomore forward, dropped a game-high 25 points and snagged 11 rebounds, while Maddox Marshall, a speedy 5’9” guard led the fastbreak with 22 points.
Roush said that his team prepared all week for Southwood’s style of play, especially after playing them once already in the season. But the size and speed is difficult to simulate in practice, no matter which way they tried it.
On top of Southwood’s attack, Southern Wells perhaps played tight and had the magnitude of the game on their minds.
“For the first five minutes, I thought we were extremely nervous,” Roush said. “To some degree, everybody is, and if you don’t acre about (the sectional), maybe you’re not nervous, but our guys truly care and truly want to be good, and I just think the nerves got the better of us in the first quarter.”
At halftime, perhaps the nerves settled down for a while — Southern Wells outscore Southwood 20-17 in the third quarter.
Chandler Oswalt hit nylon twice from long range, two of his three from there. CJ Reber added a triple and a bucket. The two traded them off back-to-back before Perrin Gates’ old-fashioned three in the paint, helping spark a 9-2 run.
Unfortuantely, that run didn’t carry over for the rest of the game. Southwood put together its third 20-plus point quarter performance to leave no question in the victory.
“You saw it in the third quarter how we wanted to play the whole game, but I guess we settled down after halftime and it was probably too late,” Roush said.
Last year, Southern Wells graduated a handful of seniors and passed the torch to this group. This was the final game in the careers of Oswalt, Gates, Evan Pennington, Andrew Aker and Caleb Johnson — one of Roush’s favorite groups.
He mentions what those four leave behind is a model of hard work and dedication to the game for the players behind them.
The five will also leave behind is something special on the court, as Oswalt, Pennington and Gates are the top three scorers, while Gates and Aker are the top two rebounders on the team.
But Roush hopes that players in the future will pick that up from the five,
“Number 1 there’s no give up in them. That’s probably the thing that I’m most proud of,” Roush said. “I’d like to hope I had something to do with that. They’re hard workers, they outlasted a lot of kids in their grade that maybe it didn’t mean as much to them. I just think they left a legacy of hard work, commitment, discipline and those types of things.”
ryan@news-banner.com
SOUTHWOOD 81, SOUTHERN WELLS 50
At Southern Wells
SOUTHWOOD (8-14): Bryce Wilcox 11-16 2-3 25, Maddox Marshall 9-14 2-3 22, Will Winer 8-12 0-0 16, Dalton Barney 2-6 0-2 4, Jaret Denney 1-7 1-2 3, Emery Liddick 1-3 0-0 3, Caleb Wyatt 1-1 0-0 3, Drake Cooper 1-1 0-0 3, Aiden Hawkins 0-1 0-0 0, Randall Boone 0-0 0-0 0. TOTALS: 34-63 5-10 81.
SOUTHERN WELLS (8-15): Perrin Gates 4-6 5-5 13, Chandler Oswalt 5-15 0-0 13, CJ Reber 4-14 2-2 11, Andrew Aker 2-6 0-1 4, Evan Pennington 2-7 0-0 4, Joshua Aulbach 1-1 1-4 3, Caleb Johnson 1-2 0-0 2, Landon Johnson 0-2 0-0 0, Trey Slusher 0-1 0-0 0.TOTALS: 19-54 8-12 50.
Southwood 21 21 17 22 — 81
S. Wells 8 11 20 11 — 50
Three-point FG: Southwood 5-13 (Marshall 2-4, Cooper 1-1, Wyatt 1-1, Liddick 1-3, Wilcox 1-2, Winer 0-1, Hawkins 0-1), Southern Wells 4-17 (Oswalt 3-11, Reber 1-4, Aker 0-2, Gates 0-1, L. Johnson, Slusher 0-1). Rebounds: Southwood 29 (Wilcox 11, Denney 5, Barney 5, Winer 3, Liddick 2, Marshall 2, Wyatt 1, Southern Wells 24 (Gates 6, Aker 6, Oswalt 4, Reber 3, Pennington 2, C. Johnson 2, Aulbach 1). Turnovers: Southwood 15, Southern Wells 22. Fouls: Southwood 13, Southern Wells 10. Fouled Out: None. Technicals: None.
