Deflated: Emporia High boys stumble at Washburn Rural, 59-55
By Michael Ashford
Saturday, January 27, 2007
TOPEKA — Perhaps the end result would have been more favorable if the Emporia High boys basketball team would have been able to use a deflated basketball against Washburn Rural Friday night.
The Spartans practice with an under-inflated ball as a way to encourage more passing and less one-on-one dribbling, but against the Junior Blues, the Spartans forgot the lessons of the deflated basketball, and the outcome was a 59-55 loss to their rivals.
“We’re a good shooting team,” junior Seth Torres said, “but when it’s not going down for us, we’ve got to look for our other options, and we didn’t get that done.”
The Spartans suffered from what coach Rick Bloomquist called “a lack of focus with our roles on the offensive end,” saying that many of his players tried to do too much on their own instead of working within the confines of the offense.
“We really backslid when it comes to playing together offensively,” Bloomquist said. “We have certain roles on this team that people are supposed to have, and nobody was looking for their role offensively. We weren’t picking, we weren’t setting screens, we were dribbling the ball way too much.
“Everybody was looking to score themselves instead of working together as a team.”
Emporia High (6-4, 1-2 Centennial League) led 25-16 at halftime and pushed that advantage out to 10 points at 30-20 less than 2 minutes into the third quarter on a driving lay-in by Kyle deBlonk. However, Washburn Rural (6-5, 4-1) was able to whittle away at the Spartan lead after that thanks to the combination of a strong inside game and a late shooting touch from the outside.
Rural forwards Tanner Speake, Austin Bork and John Pecis — who had a size advantage on just about every EHS player — combined for 23 points in the second half and kept several Junior Blues possessions alive by grabbing offensive rebounds. Of Washburn Rural’s 20 second-half rebounds, 11 came on the offensive end.
That, in turn, made it difficult for the Spartans to get out in transition on offense, sophomore Taylor Euler said.
“We go against teams with size just about every game, so we try to use our speed to match that. They were getting so many offensive rebounds that we couldn’t get out and run,” Euler said. “For us to be the Emporia offense that we want to be, we have to go out and run an up-tempo offense. We’re not really a half-court team. We want to get out and go, shoot threes, and be a run-and-gun kind of team, and we weren’t able to do that tonight.”
Added Torres: “We were trying to get rebounds and stops and get shots to fall, and it just wasn’t happening at the time. Especially giving them easy shots, it was real frustrating. We want to try to challenge them on every shot, and we didn’t. That’s tough.”
By the end of the third quarter, the Junior Blues had inched to within four points at 39-35. Greg Schmidt hit a 3-pointer — one of four threes Washburn Rural hit after halftime after recording just one in the first half — that cut the Spartans’ lead to 41-40 with 7 minutes to go. Over the game’s next 4 minutes, the Junior Blues outscored EHS, 9-4, taking the lead when Speake hit a mid-lane jumper that gave Rural a 49-47 edge, and the Spartans would never lead again.
The Spartans had four turnovers during that stretch and made just one shot from the field. Emporia managed to cut what became a five-point Rural lead to one point late, but the Junior Blues hit 8 of 12 free throws to ice the game.
“When you have a 10-point lead in the second half and then you give that up, it’s hard,” Euler said. “It’s all our fault. They didn’t do anything great to get back in the game, we just lost a lot of possessions and made a lot of bad mistakes — all of us. It wasn’t just one person, a lot of us did. They slowly got back in the game, took the lead, and we couldn’t do anything about it after that.”
A good indication of the Spartans’ offensive woes was that their leading scorer, Caydrick Bloomquist, finished with four points after entering the game averaging 16.1 points a contest, and only took two shots in the second half.
“It’s going to seem like Washburn Rural put the clamps on him, but the guy that was guarding him is no better than anybody else we’ve faced,” Rick Bloomquist said. “In the second half, he was never involved. For us to be a threat offensively, he has to be involved. I’d say the same thing if I had a 7-foot center.”
Euler and Troy Pierce led EHS with 18 points apiece, while Schmidt had 11 points to lead Washburn Rural, with Speake, Pecis and Bork each chipping in 10 points.
Centennial League
Friday at Washburn Rural
Emporia 12 13 14 16 — 55
Washburn Rural 9 7 19 24 — 59
EMPORIA (6-4, 1-3 Centennial League)
K. deBlonk 3-9 0-1 6, D. Cox 0-2 0-0 0, C. Bloomquist 1-7 1-2 4, T. Euler 7-15 4-4 18, T. Pierce 8-10 2-5 18, S. Torres 2-5 2-2 7, E. Dorsey 1-1 0-0 2. Totals 22-49 9-14 55.
WASHBURN RURAL (6-5, 4-1)
J. Werner 2-5 0-0 5, T. Speake 3-8 3-4 10, G. Schmidt 2-7 5-7 11, A. Bork 5-9 0-1 10, J. Valerius 1-6 0-1 2, J. Pecis 3-5 4-5 10, J. Fisher 0-0 1-4 1, J. Ochsner 1-5 2-2 5, S. Scott 0-1 0-0 0, K. Vander Hart 0-0 3-4 3, D. Hungerford 0-1 0-0 0. Totals 17-47 18-28 59.
3-point goals — Emporia 2-14 (deBlonk 0-1, Bloomquist 1-6, Euler 0-5, Torres 1-2), WR 5-16 (Werner 1-2, Speake 1-1, Schmidt 2-7, Bork 0-1, Ochsner 1-5). Rebounds — Emporia 27 (Pierce 11), WR 37 (Valerius 7). Assists — Emporia 9 (deBlonk, Torres 3), WR 7 (Schmidt 3). Turnovers — Emporia 13, WR 17. Total fouls — Emporia 23, WR 14. Fouled out — None.