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Second-half surge leads Raiders past Clippers
By charles grove
Beaver township
What seemed like one of those ugly, modern art pieces you don’t undertstand in the first half turned into a masterpiece in the second for South Range as it defeated Columbiana 50-32 in a tournament opener.
Neither squad looked the least bit confident on offense in the first half of their Division III sectional semifinal. After a first quarter that saw South Range jump out to a 14-7 lead, both teams combined for 11 points in the second quarter while each team made only one field goal for the eight-minute stretch.
But that all changed in the second half.
A 5-0 run to open the second half sparked a 14-0 run later in the quarter and suddenly, what was a 20-12 halftime score became a laugher in a matter of minutes.
Brandon Youngs led the Raiders (18-5) with 12 points while Mitch Dolak and Preston Stitt added nine points apiece. Burdette Baker led the Clippers (5-18) with 12 points in the loss.
“We were getting good shots, we just weren’t making them,” South Range head coach John Cullen said.
Cullen said his team wasn’t able to “hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle” during the first half, but said his team did perform extremely well in areas of the game that will keep scores close, even if you have similar luck with a violin.
“There’s four things that if you do every game, you’ll be in every game,” Cullen said. “Rebounding, play defense, don’t turn the ball over and hit your free thows. We only missed one free throw in the first half, we rebounded like crazy, we played good defense and we only had four turnovers to their 10.”
And once the dust settled after that lopsided third quarter, the fourth quarter seemed more a formality than anything else as the student sections rifled back chants to each other — Columbiana reminding the Raiders they made the playoffs in football this year while South Range pointed to the scoreboard.
“We just didn’t execute our offense or our sets,” Columbiana head coach Wesley Cross said. “They did a really good job defensively clogging up the paint and deflecting a lot of balls that led to turnovers.
“In the second half we wanted to keep them from getting that big run but they had too many transition baskets in the second half and then they started to knock down some shots.”
Columbiana was able to give South Range problems in their regular-season matchup on Dec. 15 by hitting the glass hard. Cullen thought his team did a good job not allowing that to happen this go around.
“Last time they got 15 offensive rebounds against us and they scored 62 percent of their points on offensive rebounding and free throws,” Cullen said.
“I thought our guys did a good job limiting that tonight. I thought we limited Baker well since he’s a good offensive player. We wanted to make sure we limited him and [Jared] Wilson because they’ve both been scoring quite a bit lately.”
The Raiders move on to a sectional final against United, a team South Range defeated twice in the regular season — 70-33 in December, and 65-29 in January.
Tipoff is set for 7 p.m. on Friday at South Range.