Gallery by Heather Belcher
Shady Spring head coach Ronnie Olson kept his team in the locker room for nearly all of the 10-minute halftime period.
That was nearly as long as his Tigers kept Elkins off the board out of the break.
Elkins’ first field goal of the third quarter came at the 1:13 mark, summing up a performance in which Olson and Co. dominated en route to a 61-37 Friday night in the New River CTC Invitational at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center.
That drought was consistent with what Elkins head coach Amrit Rayfield saw his team struggle with throughout the night. They hit on eight field goals in the first half, but attempted just 11. Shady in contrast fired up 28 shots and converted on 14 over that span.
“I think you see a lot of our teams, if you’ll notice, come out at the beginning of games and of halftimes and our guys play the game so fast that sometimes it’s hard to remember all the details,” Olson said. “It’s just normal, right? We do chaos, we play chaotic, but once we sit down and we focus. Our guys just don’t come out and sit down, let’s communicate. It’s really hard to stop. We still pressured but we were more focused on stoping them in a half court game and I thought they did a good job. I mean you heard them point and yell and push and shove each other and I think that we felt like if we just sat down we would have been tough for them to score on.”
Shots and points were difficult for Elkins to come by all night.
The visiting Tiger started in a rut, getting off just four shots in the opening quarter. It didn’t help that Shady swiped seven passes.
The onslaught began early when Brody Radford stole a pass and hit Jalon Bailey fort a 3 to make it 5-0 Shady. Khi Olson followed with another trey before Dylan Hinzman put Elkins on the board with a triple. Radford found Bailey again for an answer, a trend that continued.
Elkins’ second and final field goal of the first quarter came on a Brock Holland 3 but was again answered, this time by Olson, to make it 16-6 Shady. A pair of buckets from Ammar Maxwell and another from Bailey gave Shady a 22-6 advantage after a quarter.
The lead expanded to 19 early in the second quarter but a 7-0 run, powered by a pair of Holland treys cut it to 11.
But Shady clamped down, closing the half on an 11-2 run. The spell extended to the third where the home-standing Tigers ground the visitors into submission.
“Every game they jump out in the first quarter and we were trying to keep that from happening,” Amrit said. “We weren’t able to do that and I noticed that we played even the rest of the way but really the difference with the first quarter, the amount of pressure was our whole thing and the confidence and we want them to really have it and that’s all a credit to them and what they do, and doing that you know, we have trouble scoring right now. And when you take a team like that it’s hard to score and I think if we were able to score good and our defense did a little bit more, that would have helped. But turning it over and not getting scores to get out in transition hurt a little bit. But they’re just a great team. I’m glad that our kids battled for 32 minutes. I mean, certainly prior to that they battled for 32 and played their hearts out tonight. So I’m proud of that.”
As good as Shady was defensively, limiting Elkins to 25 shots and forcing 18 turnovers, it was efficient on offense inside the arc. Shady finished 21 of 28 on 2-point attempts, attacking in the paint.
“It was by design because their zone if you notice they were really pushing out hard on our guards,” Olson said. “So we felt like early we probably could have got it in the middle a little earlier and then dumped down. You know we run a kind of little old school play there where we saw Gavin got a lot of them and Ammar and him fed off each other. We felt like that would have been open because they were pressing hard on our guards and rightfully so because they deserve it. They’ve been shooting the ball so well but they moved the ball so well too. I mean, it’s easier said than done. You can’t just get it there and go, you got to get it, get it, get it and go. So they did a good job of really moving the ball and having the defense chase and that’s where a lot of those layups came from and that was by design.”
Bailey led all scorers with 16 points in the win while Gavin Davis finished with 14 on 7 of 9 shooting.
Holland led Elkins with 14 points in the loss.
