Southern and Lowellville score wins in Division IV

By Chuck Housteau

sports@vindy.com

STRUTHERS

Four Inter Tri-County teams were on display at the Division IV district tournament Wednesday night.

In the opener, Southern, a Tier Two team, turned back Tier One team Columbiana 64-56, while Lowellville ran away from Leetonia 54-44 in the second contest.

Southern standout, senior Gabe Martins, an exchange student from Brazil, said playing against an upper-tier team was more than enough motivation for the Indians to play well against Columbiana.

Martins led a group of four Southern players who scored in double figures.

Eric Baker paced Southern with 18 points and 10 rebounds, while Jake Boyle added 16 points and 10 more boards. Martin and Trey Griffith each tallied 12 points for the Indians.

“Its pretty neat for us. We were very excited to get a win and play for a sectional championship game next,” said Martins. “We hear about the rivalry between Tier One teams and Tier Two teams and we wanted to get this win bad.”

Southern coach George Whittaker said all his starters are capable of scoring and when they do, “good things happen.”

“It’s nice when you get balanced scoring like we do,” said Whittaker. “We had five guys reach double figures against Wellsville the other night. It’s tough for a team to shut everyone down when we are playing well.”

The Indians (13-8) played well right out of the gate by outscoring the Clippers 15-4. Southern opened up leads of 19-6 and 21-10 before ending the first period with a 23-13 lead.

After that first period it was a tight contest.

Columbiana coach Eric Whitmer said he didn’t like the way the game unfolded.

“We have a breakdown on the jump ball and then their guy banks in a 3 from about 28 feet so we get down early,” Whitmer said. “From that point on we played pretty well.

“We missed our point guard [injured senior Logan Goist].”

Senior Tyler Denmeade picked up the slack for Goist although he was playing out of position.

Denmeade was a one-man show at times for the Clippers as he tallied 26 points.

In the second game, Lowellville (15-6) pulled away from a 23-21 lead to advance.

Lowellville had defeated the Bears (3-18) twice in the regular season but needed overtime to defeat Leetonia in one of the early contests.

“We were deathly afraid of this came coming in after getting our hearts broken in last week’s last-second loss to McDonald,” said Lowellville Mike Mangine. “I think that’s why we came out so slow tonight.”

Mauro Amendola scored a game-high 20 points, including 16 in the second half while teammates Anthony Alfano and Pat Minnie added 10 points each.

Dan Davanzo and Nick Altomare led Leetonia with 10 points each.