Gallery by Heather Belcher
Beckley – Princeton’s gauntlet run is off to a rough start.
Playing their second game in four days, the Tigers never found a groove Thursday, falling 55-35 to Class AA Charleston Catholic in the Little General Battle for the Armory at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center.
The Irish found a rhythm on offense and maintained it throughout the afternoon, connecting on 50 percent of their 44 shots.
“We always want to just get a good shot,” Catholic head coach Hunter Moles said. “There’s no shot clock, so you want to get a good one. Sometimes we play fast. Sometimes we slow it down. We’ve got to know the time and the score a little bit. And when we do run some of our sets we want to try to execute. We could’ve executed a little better. It’s a credit to Princeton, they got up in us and they would trap you some and they mix defenses up. So that made it hard for us to get into a rhythm. But like you said we shot the ball pretty well and that always helps on the road. You know, you want to shoot it well. We had a couple of early ones probably helped loosen us up. So if you take good shots, you’re gonna be more comfortable with those tough shots. They’re tough shots for a reason and are hard to hard to make. So we just want to make it easy as possible for us.”
Princeton in comparison connected on just 36 percent of its 36 shot attempts and never found easy buckets. The Tigers broke 10 points in just one quarter, further lamenting their offensive struggles. Losing starter Nik Fleming to an ankle injury Wednesday night against Spring Valley didn’t help the cause.
“I mean, their defense has been the best we’ve seen all year,” Princeton head coach Robb Williams said. “You know, we played a tough game last night in Summersville against the good team, and we’re able to run and play tough. Today, they were all over the guards, which we expected that this year from some teams. And fortunately, we have a lot of sets that to execute against them but their defense was top notch. I mean, they were in our face, they gave our point guard (Gavin) Stover a heck of a time an dit didn’t help with one of our most gifted offensive players (Fleming) out.”
Stover gave the Tigers their lone lead of the game when he scored the game’s first bucket. Then the Irish scored the next 11 points with Jeff Reynolds, Jayallen Turner, Max Wilcox and Gio Cinco taking turns contributing to the run.
The Irish lead later swelled to 11 at 18-7 in the second quarter but the Tigers rallied with a 6-0 run to cut the deficit with buckets from Koen Sartin, Marquel Lowe and Stover.
But the offensive struggles hampered Princeton’s ability to extend runs and truly threaten with Williams mixing and matching his lineups to get the best of both sides.
“I’ve got I’ve got a long bench and some are gifted athletically or faster defensively and some are gifted offensively,” Williams said. “I try to get a good mix. We made a run with the defensive guys. And you know, we don’t always get the offense and then we get the offense but we always get the defensive side. They work at it and they’ll get there get there but it’s just one of those things and where we actually have a lot of young guys too.”
An 11-2 Catholic run to close the half staked the Irish to a 29-15 advantage at the break but Princeton’s most productive quarter, a 15-12 frame, helped the Tigers trim a 17-point deficit in the third quarter down to 11 at the start of the fourth.
But again their offense went cold and by the time Princeton scored in the final frame they were down 20.
“I think just sticking to our details helped,” Moles said. “I think we got a little complacent and thought we were just going to open the game up. Princeton is not gonna just let you just come out and beat them that easy. They’re in there. They’re gonna come and they’re real scrappy, they’re gonna come out and try to get back in it and they did so I thought after our timeout we responded well in the second quarter. We finished that quarter really well. We want to finish every quarter well.
“Going into halftime we have a saying win the third quarter, finish the fourth and we didn’t win the third. So I thought everybody took that and used it as motivation. Hey, we didn’t win the third. So we got to come out here in the fourth. We got to win it. It’s an 11-point game, can we push it to 15? Or are they going to cut it under 10 and our guys responded the right way. We’ve got some guys have been here before so they understand the game inside a little bit.”
Max Wilcox led Catholic and all scorers with 17 points while Turner pitched in 15. Princeton had four different players score seven each in the loss.
The Irish will play the winner of James Monroe-Wyoming East in the championship game on Friday at 4 p.m. while Princeton will play the loser at 2 p.m.
