First Posted: 3/4/2015
VAN WERT — Maybe the in between part could have used a little work, but Delphos St. John’s started strong and finished strong in a 59-33 win over Cory-Rawson in its Division IV boys basketball sectional opener Wednesday night at Van Wert High School.
St. John’s (16-6) got 15 points from Andy Grothouse, 12 from Alex Odenweller and 11 from Tyler Conley.
The Blue Jays will play Lincolnview on Friday night for a sectional championship. The Lancers beat Pandora-Gilboa 72-40 in Wednesday night’s other game at Van Wert.
St. John’s jumped out to a 25-3 lead 11 minutes into the game to put an upset out of the question.
Cory-Rawson battled back to cut the lead to nine points midway through the third quarter before St. John’s pulled away.
“Sometimes it’s tough to play with a big lead. I’m not big into excuses but you see that a lot where the atmosphere is not great, you get out to a huge lead and the guys are kind of on their heels,” St. John’s coach Aaron Elwer said.
“We want to play well each possession of every game and we had some lapses where we didn’t. Our guys are not happy with their performances at times but we are happy to we’re moving on. We’ll need to play better Friday night,” he said.
St. John’s shot 61 percent on field goals (24 of 39) out-rebounded the Hornets 28-15 and had 13 turnovers, six of them in the second quarter.
We did a lot of really good things. We did what we were supposed to do. We came out and got out to a good start,” Elwer said. “You’re not going to hold a team down for 32 minutes. Give our guys credit. We came out and got a good lead and at some point we started to extend it and we wore on them.”
Matthew Alspach’s 11 points led Cory-Rawson (5-18).
Lincolnview 72,
Pandora-Gilboa 40
The Lancers’ win, much like St. John’s victory in the first game, was decided early.
After P-G went up 10-7 in the first quarter, Lincolnview finished the first half with a 33-4 run to go up 40-14 after two quarters.
Senior guard Justis Dowdy, who finished with 32 points, outscored Pandora-Gilboa by himself in the first half with 20 points.
“That’s the Justis we’ve had all year long. He’s had games like this for us, out of the 23 games, probably 15 of them. He’s the key. When he’s going like he was tonight, no matter who we’re playling against, we get on a roll,” Lincolnview coach Brett Hammons said.
Colin Fenstermaker led Pandora-Gilboa with 15 points.
Lincolnview (14-9) moves on to a sectional championship against St. John’s on Friday night. P-G finished its season 3-20.
Friday night’s sectional championship game will be a rematch of a regular season game between St. John’s and Lincolnview. The Lancers won that game 58-53 at home Feb. 7.
“That was a game where we were down by 10 in the first half and cut it to eight at halftime. We came out in the second half and played pretty well. We’re going to have to have the same effort or better. I think we’re going to have to be better Friday night if we want to win,” Hammons said.
