Rockets fall short in section final

If you happened to catch just the very end of the Southwest District Division IV section final between Fayetteville-Perry and Riverview East Academy, you may have thought the outcome was a slam-dunk for Riverview East.

But a dunk by Hawks standout Anthony Ware at the buzzer didn’t do much more than pad the final score in a game that was, for the most part, much closer than that final tally might indicate.

Third-seeded Fayetteville-Perry led 11-5 lead after one quarter and 16-13 at the half before being outscored 28-14 in the second half – including 13-5 in the final two minutes of the game – and falling 41-30 to the top-seeded Hawks on Wednesday, Feb. 22 at Princeton High School.

Despite leading at the half, the defending section champion Rockets didn’t shoot particularly well from the field in the first two quarters (33.3 percent). But they went even colder in the second half (27.8 percent), while the Hawks improved from 25 percent shooting in the first half to a red-hot 69.2 percent in the second half.

And that, according to Fayetteville-Perry head coach DJ McCommons, was pretty much the ball game.

“We had our chances, but we just couldn’t put the ball in the basket … We couldn’t make the shots,” said McCommons, in his fourth year at the Rockets’ helm. “We got some pretty good shots, but we just weren’t in rhythm with a lot of the shots. Tonight they (the Hawks) were the better team.”

Riverview East’s Rico Lewis scored the first points of the game on a close-range basket 1:30 into the contest before Fayetteville-Perry reeled off seven consecutive points for a 7-2 lead.

After a 3-pointer cut the Rockets’ lead to 7-5, both teams went cold until late in the opening quarter, when senior guard AJ Attinger scored the last four points of the stanza for an 11-5 Fayetteville-Perry cushion.

“We came out locked in,” McCommons said of the team’s early play. “And we did a good job of making them take tough shots.”

Junior guard Caleb Tipis hit a 3-pointer in the first minute of the second quarter to give Fayetteville-Perry it’s biggest lead, 14-5, but the Rockets would score just two more points in the quarter as the Hawks closed the gap to three points, 16-13, at the half.

Points remained hard to come by for both teams early in the third quarter. Junior guard Isaiah Harris gave the Hawks their first lead since early in the first quarter, 19-18, with five minutes left in the third quarter. And after another scoring lull, the Rockets scored the next three points for a 21-19 edge with two minutes left in the third. But the Hawks scored the last four points of the quarter for a 23-21 edge entering the final eight minutes.

Attinger scored on a layup following a steal to tie the game at 23 early in the fourth. But Ware put the Hawks up for good soon after, 25-23, with a pair of free throws.

The Rockets kept it close until the last two minutes of the game before the Hawks pulled away. Lewis scored from inside to give the Hawks their biggest lead of the game up to that point, 30-25, with two minutes left. From there, the Hawks slowed down the pace and the Rockets were forced to foul – that and ice-cold shooting down the stretch sealed the Rockets’ fate.

Attinger led the team with 12 points – his season average –followed by Tipis with eight, Cayden Jones with five and Chase Hendrix with three. Senior 6-foot-7 center Austin Snider, the team’s leading scorer this season at over 13 points a game, was held to two points. Ware led the Hawks with 18 points.

“I’m super-proud of them,” McCommons said of the team, which featured five seniors and won a school-record 19 games, he said. “They should be proud of this season. This (loss) is nothing to hang our heads about.”