Perfect in ACAC

BERNE — The fear was that perhaps the Starfires could go overlooked.

The Patriots were coming off their biggest win of the season, and sectional is set to begin in just a few days.

Jay County had one final game on its schedule, and the Starfires had a chance to spoil perfection.

It wasn’t pretty, but the Jay County High School girls basketball team finished off a flawless Allen County Athletic Conference record with a 47-30 victory against the South Adams Starfires on Thursday at Stardome.

The triumph secured a 6-0 mark for the Patriots in winning the regular season ACAC title, backing up its tournament championship earlier this month.

“It’s great to win the conference, be undefeated in the conference,” said JCHS coach Kirk Comer, whose team was 15th in this week’s Class 3A poll voting. “I’m disappointed with the intensity we had tonight, which I expected a little bit of a letdown after (upsetting fourth-ranked Norwell on Monday).

“Good regular season, 17-3. Great group of kids. I don’t even think we’re close to our potential. Hopefully we can continue to play for a while and keep getting better.”

South Adams coach Brett Freeman, who only had six available players, was pleased with the way his Starfires (9-12, 2-4 ACAC) fought to the finish.

“We came out second half, kept battling, battling,” he said. “Obviously they’ve got a strong team. Of course they have the height advantage over us quite a bit.

“Us being shorthanded tonight, I thought our girls battled and fought as hard as they could.”

Jay County scored the first nine points of the game while South Adams missed its first seven shots from the floor. The Starfires got 3-pointers from Macy Pries and Kristen Wynn for a respectable 11-6 deficit at the end of the first quarter.

Four points each from sisters Aubrie and Renna Schwieterman, two by Izzy Rodgers and a Gabi Bilbrey bucket helped Jay County begin the second on a 12-3 run, and the Patriots went into halftime leading 27-16.

The visitors began the third quarter with another run, this one of seven points. During the surge, Renna Schwieterman had a free throw miss the mark, ending a stretch of 20 consecutive makes from the stripe that spanned three games.

Schwieterman then drained the second of her two 3-pointers on the night, staking the Patriots to a 33-16 advantage before Breanna Dirksen split free throws.

In the fourth, Schwieterman capped her game-high 23-point night with a fast-break bucket that gave the Patriots their biggest lead, 47-23.

“To be honest I don’t think we were as focused as we needed to be and to be honest I told the kids, even me, I probably wasn’t as focused as I should have been,” said Comer, whose team had missed about a dozen close-range shots and was 17-of-35 (48.6%) on 2-point field goals. “We can’t overlook anybody. We can’t take anybody for granted because there is not a switch you just turn on and off. We have to be mentally prepared.”

Madison Dirksen scored 10 points in support of Schwieterman’s fourth consecutive game with 23 or more points.

Pries led South Adams with 13 points, and Wynn finished with 11 as the Starfires’ starting five played the entire first half.

“Just the fact we fought,” Freeman said of the biggest takeaway. “Of course they obviously have the advantage in a lot of areas and they have probably the best player in the area. I thought for the most part we did an awfully good job (and) kept them below their scoring average (of 49.3 points per game).

“I thought, for a bunch of 5-foot-nothings, I really thought we battled.”