Last-second misses end season for South Adams

BERNE — In between the third and fourth quarters, Trent Lehman implored his players.

Someone needed to grab the leadership role and make a play.

The Starfires made a few in the fourth quarter to give themselves a chance. But two shots in the closing seconds failed to fall.

Spenser Clark’s 3-pointer was just off and a put-back try at the buzzer by Victor Vazquez caromed a bit too hard off the backboard. As a result, the

South Adams High School boys basketball team fell 32-31 Friday to the Bluffton Tigers as its season ended in the Class 2A sectional semifinal at Stardome.

“It’s a microcosm of the year,” said Lehman, whose SAHS squad finished at 5-18 in his first season at the helm. “There were really five games this year that we weren’t in with a chance to win in the fourth quarter.

“So many of them were just like that. And I have no clue why we couldn’t hit. It just seemed like the other team always hit a few more shots than us at the end.”

First Vasquez turned the ball over while trying to feed In’t Groen in the post. Then In’t Groen had a shot miss when he was muscled under the basket and blocked by Bluffton’s Max Corle.

With 9.9 seconds left, the Tigers’ Gavin King went to the line for a one-and-one opportunity. He missed the front end, and Brandon Newman grabbed the rebound and handed the ball to James Arnold.

The Starfire freshman pushed the ball up the court to the free-throw line and found Clark wide open in the left corner. The junior’s try from long distance skipped off the rim. Vasquez snagged the rebound in mid-air and put it back up before the buzzer, and his shot off the backboard hit the front of the rim twice before falling off.

“If the three goes, we’ve got a time out,” said Bluffton coach Chris Benedict. “We’ve got a little bit of time maybe to do something with it.

“When he misses it and then it’s the offensive put-back, you’re going to have no time if that thing goes in. So you’re just kind of at the mercy of whether or not it goes in … We’ve been on the other side of that many times. We were fortunate to be on the right side of it today.”

South Adams was within three throughout the final 5:45 of the game, even tying the game on an In’t Groen hoop with 2:19 remaining. But the Tigers (10-14) did just enough to hold on in a game in which points were hard to come by for both teams.

“Both of us had our chances coming down the stretch,” said Benedict, whose team reclaimed the advantage for good on an old-fashion three-point play by Evan Baumgartner. “It kind of looked like neither one of us wanted to get it done.

“They’ve got that old saying, ‘survive and advance.’ We survived tonight.”

While the game came down to the closing moments, the turning point was the opening minutes of the second half. Bluffton turned a one-point deficit at the intermission into a five-point advantage thanks to 3-pointers from J.J. Irwin and Rylie Johnston (eight points apiece).

South Adams never got the lead again.

Irwin finished 5-of-6 from the foul line for Bluffton, which moves on to play Canterbury (10-14) in tonight’s sectional championship game in Berne.

The bulk of the offense for the Starfires ran through In’t Groen and Arnold. The former finished 6-of-8 from the field for 14 points while the latter totaled eight points. Newman, who recorded a couple of key steals in the fourth quarter, added six points.