Pack earns SBAAC National Div. Co-Player of Year honors –
Staff Report, Champion Media –
A notable season of high school hoops has come to an end for the Georgetown G-Men.
After finishing their regular season as the Southern Buckeye Athletic/Academic Conference National Division champions with a perfect league record of 12-0, the No. 5 seed G-Men bowed out in round two of the Southwest District Division III Sectional Tournament at Western Brown High School on Tuesday, Feb. 27 with a heart breaking 55-52 loss to the No. 9 seed Clark Montessori Cougars.
The G-Men wrapped up a successful 2017-18 winter basketball campaign with a 15-8 overall record.
The G-Men were given some good opportunities to at least tie the game and send it into overtime during their sectional bout against Clark Montessori, but some missed shots down left them on the short side of the scoreboard.
Trailing, 54-52, Georgetown senior Logan Doss drove to the basket with under 10 seconds remaining in hopes of keeping the Georgetown boys’ basketball season alive, but his shot went off the backboard, hit the front of the rim and landed in the hands of Clark’s Brazeil Moore. Moore passed it ahead to Sean Ealy, who made one free throw to finish off Clark Montessori’s three-point sectional playoff win at Western Brown on Tuesday.
Doss had found a great deal of success with his penetration to the hoop, especially in the second half, putting together a fine court performance to help keep the G-Men within striking distance in Tuesday’s game.
“We put the ball in Logan’s hands – he bobbled it a little bit on that last play – but the play is set up where if they help on Logan, this corner guy is going to be wide open and we had a shooter here ready to shoot the ball. If he was wide open, we were going to go ahead and win the game. At the end of that, if none of it’s open, we always have Noah Pack rolling back to the block,” said Georgetown coach Doug Williams. “It is what we wanted, we just missed it.”
The G-Men ended the second quarter on a 14-2 run to take a 28-23 lead into the locker room for halftime. Georgetown junior Noah Pack had seven points in the frame while Doss had six.
Clark Montessori started the third quarter on a 6-2 run to pull within a point of Georgetown, before eventually tying the game, 33-33, on a floater from Ealy with 4:30 remaining in the quarter.
“It’s the tournament, right? And we’ve been through the season and we have our limitations, but we have some things we do pretty well, and when we defend well, we’ve got a chance,” said Clark Montessori coach Wally Vickers.” The last – whatever that was – four minutes of the first half, we stopped playing. The big guy [Pack] is good. Everything went through him and we were just making it a little too easy for him to get touches and facilitate and then some other guys made plays for them. We’ve got to be disruptive, and in the second half I thought we had our moments where we were able to do that.”
A layup from Tanner Ellis, two free throws and a layup from Pack gave the G-Men a 39-33 lead, but the Cougars finished the quarter down only four after a bucket from Myles Faison.
Georgetown was able to maintain a lead until the 4:17 mark in the fourth quarter, when Ealy knocked down a 3-pointer to give Clark Montessori a 47-46 lead.
“Sean is a really skilled player. There are times – tonight was one of those – I’ve got to prod him a little bit to shoot the ball. We ran a set for him late in the third quarter and he didn’t shoot it. I was like, ‘Sean, you have to.’ He’s a good player and then he started looking to score,” said Vickers.
A layup from Doss got the G-Men back in front with 3:42 to play. After 50 seconds of scoreless play, Marlin Lyons got in the scoring column by knocking down a triple to give the Cougars a 50-48 advantage.
Clark Montessori went just 5-of-13 from the line from that point. With a one-point, 53-52 lead with 20.8 seconds remaining, Ealy miss two free throws, but Terrance McClain grabbed the offensive rebound. He was fouled and made it a two-point game with 19.4 seconds left.
Following a timeout with 14.8 seconds left, the G-Men were unable to get the tying shot to fall, ending their season.
The Cougars led at the end of the first quarter, 12-10, before extending the lead to seven at 19-12 with the help of defensive pressure the forced 14 turnovers in the game.
“We didn’t have a ton of turnovers number-wise, but when you look at how many of those turnovers lead to layups for them, that’s huge,” said Williams.
Ealy finished with 24 points to lead Clark Montessori, while D’Shawnti Hawkins had 13 and Myles Faison had 10. The Cougars improve to 13-11 and return to Western Brown for a 4:30 p.m. playoff game against Madeira.
Georgetown was led by Pack’s 16 points and 17 rebounds. Doss finished with 15 points, while Jonathan Strickland had seven and Luke Gast had 5. The G-Men end their season at 15-8, and will graduate three seniors in Gast, Doss and Strickland, but return several players, including Pack, who was named Southern Buckeye Athletic and Academic Conference National Division Co-Player of the Year.
“It’s a weird season for us because if you would have told me we were going to be 15-7, now 15-8, and had a chance to maybe play for a sectional title and have a No. 5 seed and win the league and be undefeated in the league at the beginning of the season, I would have said, ‘Now listen, I’ll take that.’ Especially after our last two seasons,” said Williams.”This is kind of what we wanted to get to, but the weird thing of it is we did it so quick, we clinched so early, that at the end of the season it was almost like we were trying to keep people interested,” added Williams. “For us, it seems like it’s ending on a down note, and we don’t want that. I told the kids in the locker room at the end that the only people that thought that we had a chance to win the league and be 12-0 and get a 5-seed in the tournament were the people sitting in this locker room. For us, what we need to make sure we do is we need to build on this and make sure people don’t think this is a one-time thing.”
To cap off their notable season on the hardwood, Pack has earned SBAAC National Division First Team and Co-Player of the Year honors, sharing in the league’s Player of the Year honors with Williamsburg senior Nate Bogan.
Also earning SBAAC American Division First Team honors this season are Doss and Georgetown senior Luke Gast.
Williams has been named as the SBAAC National Division Coach of the Year after coaching his G-Men to a league title in his second year as the Georgetown High School varsity boys’ basketball coach.
Champion Media’s Wade Linville and Jared MacDonald teamed up to bring you this story.
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