LEBO — Riding high on a four-game winning streak entering Friday’s regular-season finale, Lebo coach Doug Piper expected the best from his team.
Instead, Piper got the worst. The Wolves struggled early, hung their heads when Southern Coffey County went on a second-half run, and came away with a 50-37 loss and a nasty taste in their mouths entering substate.
“I felt real good until tonight,” Piper said. “Now we’re going to have to go back and start all over again on Monday, because we really felt like we had things going in the right direction and things were real positive, an upbeat mood, upbeat tempo. Now we’re going to have start over again on Monday.”
Other than a second quarter spurt that came with their star forward on the bench, the Wolves struggled shooting the ball — 34 percent from the field, 0-for-6 from 3-point range and 9-for-19 from the free throw line.
“We couldn’t hit shots, and a lot of that came because we didn’t have a lot of energy, didn’t play very intense, didn’t play very enthusiastic,” Piper said. “And they did a good job of that. They forced us out of things we wanted to do. Nobody stepped up.”
The Titans game plan was obvious, stop Lebo leading scorer Adam Laflin. Laflin got off to a good start, making two of his first three shots and making one of two free throws in the first quarter, but he also picked up a charge and struggled to get to the basket.
SCC played a sagging defense and had several help defenders in the lane when Laflin tried to drive. He picked up his second foul on another charge 26 seconds into the second quarter and sat the rest of the half.
Laflin made only 1-of-8 shots after the first quarter, missing mostly outside shots and one dunk in transition. He finished with seven points and six turnovers.
“They’re real athletic and then they played a real sagging man-to-man defense and put one man on him pressure and sagged off and really helped out on him,” Piper said. “When teams do that, you’ve got to have other people step up and take over some offensive load, and we didn’t have that tonight.”
Without Laflin scoring, the Wolves looked out of sync at times offensively. Laflin ended up as Lebo’s high scorer. Dylan Smith, Devon Johnston and Alex Linsey all scored six points apiece.
“We just weren’t doing what we do best,” Smith said. “We were just trying to play too much one-on-one stuff. Not running the offense, not playing good defense.”
The Wolves’ best stretch came in the second quarter with Laflin on the bench. After SCC went on an 8-0 run to start the quarter, Lebo outscored SCC 10-5 the rest of the quarter, and made 5-of-9 shots. Linsey sank a baseline runner at the buzzer to cut the lead to six, 23-17, going into halftime.
“Going into halftime, I felt pretty good,” Smith said. “We had momentum since we made the last shot at the buzzer, but third quarters for us are always slow.”
The Wolves struggled to get stops in the third quarter and SCC scored 17 points, pushing its lead to 11 going into the fourth quarter. The Wolves cut the lead to seven with 3:41 left after Johnston and Trevor White made four free throws in six seconds, but they could not score again the rest of the way.
“I think they got real frustrated, but we’ve been in this situation before and for some reason tonight nobody stepped up, nobody decided to take something on ‘em, do something different,” Piper said.
Lebo will have nine days off to regroup until its opening round substate game. Bouncing back from a poor performance is something this team has done before.
“We’ve been playing pretty well the last five or six games,” Piper said. “This is kind of like we did right before Christmas when we were in our slump, kind of stood around and watched the game go by.”
As the third seed, the Wolves will open substate at home.
“I think we have a good chance for substate,” Smith said. “If we go in and we want to play and we want to win, we have a good chance of going to State.”
Southern Coffey County 50, Lebo 37
SCC 10 13 17 10 — 50
Lebo 7 10 12 8 — 37
Southern Coffey County — Craft 9, Meyer 8, Smith 2, Kraft 4, J. Ludolph 10, A. Ludolph 6, C. Ludolph 11.
Lebo (12-8) — Linsey 6, Gould 4, White 4, Johnston 6, Perry 2, Laflin 7, Barker 2, Smith 6.