Rich Hill vs Liberal
On Tuesday night the Rich Hill Tigers travelled to Liberal to meet the Bulldogs on their home court for a WEMO conference game. This would be first trip to Liberal for the Tigers in over two years. The Tigers were coming off a victory the previous Friday in hopes of building momentum working towards districts. Liberal and the Tigers had met earlier in December in the WEMO conference tournament. The results of that meeting were not kind to the Tigers as they were soundly defeated by the Bulldogs.
In the JV game the boys again started slowly and found themselves down quickly and after the first quarter were trailing Liberal 2-16. The second quarter the Tigers were much more competitive but dropped the game 11-27. Scoring for the Tigers were Blake Laning with 6, Adrien King and Lucas Hardwood contributed 2 each and Noah Smarr got into the scoring column with one.
In the Varsity contest of the evening, the Tigers were confident that they could play with this good Liberal team consisting of five starting seniors. In the first quarter the Bulldogs got a couple of quick turnovers and jumped out to early lead. After a timeout by the Tigers to regroup, the group from Rich Hill got their act together and started attacking the Liberal press. Putting the ball in the middle, the offense was able to get to the rim and after one quarter the Tigers had gotten back into the game and were only trailing by two, 15-17. The second quarter the Tigers were able to match their opponents bucket for bucket until the last shot of the quarter when a Liberal player got to the right hand corner and drained a trey as the buzzer sounded. After getting into a better rhythm both defensively and offensively the Tigers were within five of the Bulldogs at the halftime break,29-34. This night would be a tell of two different halves for the Tigers. After halftime the Liberal team hit their first four treys and Rich Hill never could recover. The Bulldogs went on to score 32 points in the third quarter compared to just 6 points for the Tigers. In the fourth quarter both coaches went to their benches freely and as the game came to a close the Tigers dropped this conference game 39-72 to the Liberal Bulldogs. The Tigers committed 26 turnovers for the night against the Liberal press. With the loss, the Tigers season record dropped to 9-13 and 3-3 in the WEMO conference. The Tigers would next play again at home against the Drexel Bobcats on Friday night.
Scoring for the Tigers, Clifton Bridgewater 18, Brady Querry 5, Sage Bolser 4, Magal Chol 4, Lucas Harwood 4, Bryce Yohe 4, and Blake Laning 1.