COVINGTON — Fountain Central boys and girls basketball traveled to Covington Tuesday night for the annual Holiday Bi-County Tournament as the Mustangs took on the host Trojans.
The girls kicked things off and while they competed well for parts of the game, it was the host Trojans winning by a 37-31 final.
Over on the boys side from the opening tip Covington controlled all aspects of the game and defeated the Mustangs in dominating fashion 52-23.
2nd half runs doom Lady Mustangs
Throughout the first half it was Fountain Central who found themselves in control of the ball game. An 18-12 Mustang lead at halftime looked to fairly safe.
Things changed very quickly to begin the second half as Covington scored the first eight points to take a 20-18 lead for the first time in the game. Fountain Central rallied the troops and didn’t let the Trojan lead get any bigger as the score was even at 24-24 after three quarters.
What proved to be the nail in the coffin for the Mustangs was once again another run by the Trojans to begin the fourth. This time it was a 9-0 run and that would prove to be the ball game as the Mustangs couldn’t rally back.
“Unfortunately we just made errors that were really costly for us,” Mustang coach Jason Good said. “We didn’t handle their ball screens very well at times and they just jogged in for an easily lay in. Once we got a little winded and tired that’s when stopped making good decisions.”
Brailey Hoagland would lead the Mustangs (4-9) in scoring with nine points in the loss while Hannah Prickett added in eight and grabbed nine rebounds. Rylee Simko scored six points and Jerzi Hershberger while battling foul trouble scored four and secured seven rebounds. Both Kaylee Spragg and Kacey Kirkpatrick rounded our the Mustang scoring with two points each.
“It felt like the first six to seven minutes of the game went great,” Good said. “Then after that we started to settle a bit too much for threes and they weren’t falling.”
Shiann Haymaker led all scorers with 13 points in the win for the Trojans who improve to 4-8. Kali Petit used all of her six foot frame to cause havoc as she scored eight points and played good defense inside. Briley Peyton also scored seven for the Trojans.
Fountain Central did have a tough time scoring the ball in the paint due to Petit’s size. The tandem of Larissa Bowers and Kirkpatrick combined to go 1-13 in the game.
“It was hard for us to get anything going when they made us play half-court offense,” Good said. “Early in the game we were able to down the court fast enough to get some good inside looks, but it seemed like they did a much better job of getting back on defense and getting set.”
Mustangs boys out-matched by trojans
The boys looked to avoid the Trojan sweep of Fountain Central, but from the get go Covington got things to fall and the Mustangs did not. The Trojans full-court press combined with mistakes of their own for the Mustangs resulted in 21 turnovers for Fountain Central.
After a 12-6 opening quarter by the Trojans, they extended that lead to 27-13 at halftime and an even larger 40-15 Mustang deficit after three quarters.
“They hit a ton of shots and got us out of what we wanted to do early on offensively,” first year Mustangs coach Greg Dean said. “We dug ourselves a pretty big hole early and that’s hard to come back from. I thought Covington played well but we were our own worst enemy tonight.”
Some of the looks the Mustangs were getting were good ones, just that they couldn’t get any to fall, meanwhile the Trojans took full advantage of that and used the fast-break to their advantage and also knocked down seven threes in the win.
Alan Karrfalt knocked down five of those seven threes en route to his game-high 17 points. Savion Waddell added nine and Duncan Keller scored seven.
While seven players found the scoring column for Fountain Central, it was Isaac Gayler’s five points that led the Mustangs in scoring.
“We have to make sure in situations like tonight that we don’t hang our heads,” Dean said. “We just have to keep battling one possession at a time. You can negate some of the mistakes we made if you make shots, but we just weren’t able to do that.”
Dean added that once the early deficit started to occur, most of his teams turnovers simply came from trying to immediately make up for that mistake.
“We just tried to hard to make up for it,” he said. “When you compound things like that it quickly adds up.”
Both Mustang teams will now look to get back in the win columns tomorrow afternoon. The boys and girls will play the loser of Attica and Seeger games in the consolation round tomorrow back at Covington.
The girls are scheduled to get underway at 2:30 p.m. while the boys will hit the court at 4 p.m. right after the conclusion of the girls game.
