Golden Eagle boys s drop back-to-back OCC tilts to Orange, Heights

By ERIC CLINE

For The Sun­bury News

You can’t win unless you score, but if you can’t score, you’d bet­ter have a strong defense.

The Orange Pio­neers have a solid defense, and used it well in their 56–44 Ohio Cap­i­tal Con­fer­ence Cap­i­tal Divi­sion vic­tory over the Big Wal­nut Golden Eagles last Tues­day (Jan­u­ary 8) night at Big Wal­nut High School.

Orange (7–1, 4–1 OCC) had trou­ble get­ting its offense going in the open­ing period, but shut down the Big Wal­nut (5–7, 1–5 OCC) offense much of the evening, hold­ing the Golden Eagles to single-digit scor­ing in the first three periods.

“We set goals defen­sively every game, and our kids are buy­ing in,” Orange head coach Anthony Calo said. “We’re get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter every sin­gle day, and it starts in prac­tice. We’re doing a much bet­ter job of being more con­sis­tently focused and intense in prac­tice and it’s pay­ing off. It’s show­ing on the floor.”

“Their pres­sure dis­rupted us all night,” Big Wal­nut head coach Eric Myers said. “We were unable to get any type of offense estab­lished and get into any kind of offen­sive rhythm. They did a great job of pres­sur­ing our point guard, and that really both­ered us, so we’ll get in tomor­row and work to cor­rect that.”

The defense allowed the Pio­neers time to get their offense on track. Big Wal­nut also played a solid defense on senior Nick Deitsch, Orange’s lead­ing scorer, but had trou­ble stop­ping senior for­ward Tyler Dil­lard, who fin­ished with a career-high 23 points, all com­ing after the first quarter.

“Tyler’s been doing a good job becom­ing that sec­ondary scorer for us,” Calo said. “Nick is obvi­ously a very good player and peo­ple are pay­ing a lot of atten­tion to him, but all of our guys have been work­ing on their skills and all of them are ready to step up. We’re not a one-man team, so it’s excit­ing to see our other guys play­ing well.”

“Nick’s a great scorer,” Myers said. “He’s a great scorer and a pure bas­ket­ball player and we did a good job on him, but unfor­tu­nately, Tyler Dil­lard stepped up and had a big night. When you stop one, you almost have to pick your poi­son with Orange.”

After play­ing to an 8-all tie in the first, Orange opened the sec­ond period with a 9–2 run and outscored the Golden Eagles 14–7 in the quar­ter to take a 22–15 half­time lead.

The Pio­neers con­tin­ued their strong play in the third, using an 11–3 run in the mid­dle of the period to push their lead to 13 points, 33–20.

Big Wal­nut tried valiantly to get back into the game, first with the three-pointer and later on by send­ing Orange to the foul line, but the Pio­neers seemed always to have an answer.

Golden Eagle senior Zach Laugh­man hit a three-ball to cut the deficit to 10 points, 33–23, after three quar­ters, then canned another trey early in the fourth, and fel­low senior Adam Sha­heen con­verted a three-point play mid­way through the final quar­ter, but each time, it only nicked down an ever-increasing deficit as Orange built the lead back to 15 points, 48–33, with 2:20 to play.

A dunk and two threes from Sha­heen and a three-point play from Laugh­man would even­tu­ally cut the Pio­neer lead to 10 points, 54–44, with less than a minute left, but a fast-break bucket from Dil­lard with 23 sec­onds left ended the scoring.

Deitsch fin­ished with nine points for the Pio­neers, just the sec­ond time this year the senior has been held under 10 points in a game. Senior Bran­don Blake had a solid night on defense and added seven points for Orange, while seniors Brady Har­ris and Declan Feery and junior Dave Daw­son added five points each.

Laugh­man, Sha­heen and sopho­more Michael Buck­les accounted for 39 of Big Walnut’s 44 points, Laugh­man lead­ing the Golden Eagles with 17 points, includ­ing four of the team’s seven threes. Sha­heen fin­ished with 15 points and two threes, while Buck­les added seven points.

FRANKLIN HEIGHTS 46, BIG WALNUT 45 — The Golden Eagles had a chance late, but their final shot rimmed out in the wan­ing sec­onds as the host Golden Fal­cons escaped with a 46–45 Ohio Cap­i­tal Con­fer­ence Cap­i­tal Divi­sion vic­tory Fri­day night in Columbus.

Big Wal­nut (5–8, 1–6 OCC), trail­ing 15–14 after the open­ing period, outscored the Fal­cons 11–5 in the sec­ond quar­ter to take a 25–20 lead into the intermission

How­ever, Franklin Heights (5–6, 3–4 OCC) steadily chipped away at the deficit, outscor­ing the Golden Eagles 11–7 in the third quar­ter and 15–13 in the fourth to pull out the victory.

The dif­fer­ence in the game was in 3-point shoot­ing. The Fal­cons, led by the long-range shoot­ing of Joh. Tin­ker with three treys, and Justin Har­ris with two, hit 8 threes for the night, four more than the Golden Eagles. Har­ris led all scor­ers with 14 points. Tin­ker checked in with 13 points.

Adam Sha­heen and Michael Buck­les led Big Wal­nut in the scor­ing col­umn with 13 and 10 points, respectively.

Posted by Gary Henery on Jan 16 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.