By Andrew Koob
New Castle News

It wasn’t the Wilmington High boys basketball team’s effort that was in doubt last night.

Its execution, however, was off its mark in a 54-30 loss to visiting District 10, Region 2-AA opponent Lakeview.

The Greyhounds took early 4-0 and 10-6 leads before the Sailors started to get into a rhythm.

Lakeview scored 14 consecutive points spanning from the first quarter to the second to take a double-digit lead. Two buckets pulled Wilmington (3-5 region, 5-13 overall) within five points, but it was the closest the Greyhounds came to holding a lead past the first quarter.

“It’s taken us a long time to get to this point,” Lakeview coach Gary Burke said. “We haven’t functioned so well offensively as we did tonight. We switched up our offensive philosophy of what we wanted to do and Wilmington came out, to their credit, and changed defenses quite often in the first half. Our kids really adjusted well to the man-to-man, to the pressure, to the 2-3 zone.

“We executed when it came down to it, our kids made great decisions. They really moved the ball well and found the open man and I think that was the difference in the game for us offensively.”

The Sailors (3-6, 8-10) blew the doors open in the third quarter, taking a 20-1 advantage that gave them a 26-point lead heading into the final quarter.

Wilmington coach Mike Jeckavitch went with a mass sub with 2:32 remaining in the third quarter, taking out most of his starters during Lakeview’s decisive run.

“We told our kids that they were doing great things, we put a little bit more focus on getting the ball to the middle and exploiting their half-court trap from the middle of the floor,” Burke said. “When we did that, I thought we got great looks not only to kickouts for threes, but we also got some dump downs to kids cutting to the rim. Basically, it was executing, hitting that middle of the floor and taking advantage of the numbers against us.”

One of the main benefactors of breaking the trap was Austin Rice. The Sailors’ guard scored a game-high 17 points and had numerous easy looks at the basket. When the ’Hounds’ defense was able to get a hand in his face, Rice was able to convert those shots as well.

“Austin is one of the best athletes in our region,” Burke said. He has a ton of skill and tonight he really put everything together, between his quickness, his ball handling, his shooting. His defensive effort tonight on DeMedal I thought was really good. Austin had a nice game, but it had to be a team effort to take (Spencer) DeMedal and (Travis) Brumbaugh out of the game. Everybody else out on the floor gave us a great team effort defensively to stop those two kids from putting the ball in the hole.”

DeMedal led Wilmington with 10 points.

“I have no comment on this game,” Jeckavitch said.

(Email: A_Koob@ncnewsonline.com)