Gallery by Tina Laney
Reigning Class AAA state champion Shady Spring’s offense looked like one slogging through injuries in its second game of the season.
It’s defense? Well that resembled midseason form.
The Tigers forced county rival Independence into 19 first-half turnovers – 29 on the evening – propelling an efficient second-quarter run in a 72-43 victory over the Patriots in Shady Spring Friday evening.
The Tigers generated opportunities in the first quarter, getting a looks at the rim 17 times but managed to get just four of their shots (24 percent) to fall, including 1 of 7 from downtown. It left the hosts, down starters Brody Radford and Khi Olson due to injury, vulnerable as they led Indy 9-6 after a frame.
After settling in they took off, netting 9 of 17 field goal attempts (53) in the second quarter, including 5 of 9 from beyond the arc.
“I felt like everything was really sped up in the first half,” Shady head coach Ronnie Olson said. “These guys were, we wanna speed teams up everybody knows that, but people don’t realize it speeds us up sometimes. I think some of the decisions we made and the missed, layups – I saw it in scrimmages, I saw it a little bit last night. Speeding them up sometimes speeds us up. So it’s it’s something that they’re gonna have to learn to do. We talked about that after the game. We want to slow it down sometimes if we don’t have it and I think they’re just trying to go. We got a lot of young guys playing still and we started two freshmen tonight.”
Independence scrapped with Shady through a quarter despite turning it over nine times, tying the game at 6-6 following consecutive buckets from Sylas Nelson and Brock Green.
A 3-pointer from Shady freshman Eli Sexton broke the tie with under two minutes remaining in the opening quarter, a sign of what was to come.
Gabe Short opened the second quarter with another Tiger 3, pushing the advantage to 12-6 before the second of two Jack Williams dunks extended the advantage further.
Buckets by Nelson and Landon Riddle quelled the run momentarily before Sexton netted five straight with a 3 and tip in. Those shots ignited an 18-2 run that featured a pair of deep 3s from Jalon Bailey and another from Sexton, pushing the advantage to 32-14 late in the half.
“When you’re in those positions, you gotta take advantage of those situations,” Olson said. “When you got Jalon and Jack and when Brody comes back, you’re gonna get a ton of kicks, because if you’re gonna play man, we’re gonna break the defense down. You’re gonna get kicks, and you’re gonna have to knock those shots down and Braedy (Johnston) and Gabe and Eli did a great job of that.”
Indy performed well from the field in the second quarter, netting 5 of 10 attempts, but the 10 turnovers were back-breaking in an effort to counteract the Tigers’ explosion.
“I could only think of one basketball game that we had 25 turnovers and we still won,” Indy head coach Shawn Jenkins said. “That was against Bluefield (in 2018). They still turned us over 25 times, but we still but we won the game. But that’s not good. We have time. We have to eliminate our turnovers and honestly, in the first half we beat ourselves in my opinion. Their pressure, of course, causes that, but we just turned it over way too many times.”
The Tigers led 32-17 at the break before blowing the game open in the third. Williams scored 12 of his game-high 20 points out of the break while Johnston added 8 in the third, putting the game comfortably out of reach at 56-27 after three.
“The effort was there and I was very happy about the way we rebounded as well,” Olson said. “The difference was key 3-pointers as well. I think we were 0-for-7 at one point. They came in a 1-3-1 defense and we knew they were gonna do some type of zone. I hate to say this, but we’ve probably got coaches putting in a million out of bounds plays and we’ve barely put in an offense yet because we’ve been decimated with injuries. I’m not moving on until we know what we’re doing on the defensive end and you can see it on the offensive end. That’s a lot on me but the season’s long. We got a whole Christmas break and so a lot of the offensive woes were on me because we haven’t worked it yet, but our defense and rebounding was pretty good.”
Williams added 10 rebounds to go along with his 20-point performance for the Tigers. Sylas Nelson led Indy with 11 points while freshman Brock Green added 10 points and 12 rebounds.
I (0-1): 6 11 10 16 – 43
SS (2-0): 9 23 24 16 – 72
Independence
Brady Rose 2, Ashton Arthur 9, Kolton Murphy 3, Sylas Nelson 11, Kaden Bradbury 2, Landon Riddle 4, Brock Green 10, Reid Warden 2
Shady Spring
Jack Williams 20, Eli Sexton 11, Rob Lynch 1, Andrew Baker 3, Jalon BAiley 13, Trace Lilly2, Myles Clark 1, Gabe Short 9, Braedy Johnston 12
