Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Dec. 8 & 9, 2018 1BSportSWeekendJCHS wrestlers travel to Shawnee Mission-Northwest for
the second tournament of the year. More on Tuesday.
Rams fall at home, prepare for last game before break
Will Ravenstein • The Daily UnionSenior Damon Smith fights for the rebound with two St. John’s Academy players Friday at home. Despite the taller opponents Smith was able to force himself inside and behind players for rebounds and buckets, scoring a team-high 20 points on the night.
Will Ravenstein
“We played (3.5) good quarters of basketball,” St. Xavier coach AJ Vinent said after the Rams 47-44 loss to St. John’s Military Academy. “About the last four minutes we went away from our principles; staying calm.”
The Rams opened Fri-day’s game with a 4-0 run, beginning with a Damon Smith spinner from the lane. Smith led the Rams with 20 points on the day.
“He had a great game,” Vinent said. “He had a hot hand. Not only was he scor-ing, he was making plays for Jacob (Keating) operating
in the high post. We don’t run a lot of ball screens. When they went to man we threw in some ball screens in there and he was making some plays in there.”
St. John’s responded with five unanswered points as the teams began a back-and-forth scoring session with the Rams closing out the quarter on an 8-3 run.
Up 17-10, the momentum favored the Rams as they controlled the offensive advances of the taller St. John’s team.
St. Xavier continued to control the scoreboard through the first half, enter-ing the break up 25-19.
The Rams adapted to the changing defensive schemes shown by St. John’s.
“I remembered from last year that they played 3-2 (zone),” Vinent said. “Now they switched coaches, so we were kind of anticipat-ing seeing a 3-2. That’s why we had a set motion flow for that 3-2. When they went to the 2-3, scoring went down but we weren’t turning the ball over. So, it didn’t let things get out of hand. When they went to man, at first it forced a lot of turnovers — then we kind of settled into it.”
Vinent admitted ball handling struggles plagued
the team when St. John’s switched to a man defense in the second half and a full press in the final frame.
“That Achilles heel of ours, only having one true ball handler, hurts when teams go full court man,” he said. “Once they wear him down, we struggle to get that guy with confi-dence to bring the ball down.”
St. John’s scored 14 points in the third frame while limiting the Rams to 11 points while cutting the lead to three points.
The points scored were off of heads-up playing and
Please see RAMS, page 2B
Lady Blue Jays fall to 0-3 after loss to Trojans
Will Ravenstein
The Junction City Lady Blue Jays fell to the league rival Topeka High School Lady Trojans 62-24 Friday on the road.
The one-sided fight ended with five Lady Jays putting up points with Mellana Davis leading the way with seven points.
“I thought we came out and started the game pretty good, pretty decent,” coach Derek Petty said after the game. “But then we started to have mental lapses, turn-overs. I think we are hurting ourselves more than the other team is hurting us and if we can start to limit the turnovers and mental lapses on defense. I think we will start seeing even bigger improvement.”
Junction City fell behind early 18-7 after one frame played. Deep passes missing targets and shots bouncing off the rim plagued the team throughout the quarter as they fought the stingy man defense.
On the other end of the court, Topeka used their size advantage to place points on the board and never let up.
Late in the first half players were showing signs of exhaustion as they struggled to keep up the pace that Topeka was wanting to play.
As they entered the locker room at the break, Junction City looked at a 36-10 deficit.
After the break, Junction City added seven points in the third while Topeka added 17 points to take a 53-17 lead entering the final frame. This activated a running clock scenario.
Topeka started to struggle making shots in the sec-ond half, missing point blank shots under the rim, but it was the secondary and tertiary shots on goal that found points for the Lady Trojans.
Junior Axle Ocasio scored all five of the Lady Blue Jays points in the final frame. Ocasio was 3-of-4 from the charity stripe, and popped a 2-point bucket from the field.
With the loss the Lady Blue Jays fell to 0-3 on the sea-son as they prepare to host Manhattan Tuesday in Shenk Gymnasium. Tip-off is slated for 6 p.m. with the boys game to follow.
After further review, Kali Jones sets
school record for blocks in a game
Justin toscano
Fllint Hills News Service
Initially, Kansas State senior forward Kali Jones tied a school record with eight blocks in Wednes-day’s victory over Lamar.
But after further review, she didn’t tie it. She broke it.
According to Randy Peterson, the program’s sports information director, the K-State coaching staff believed there was a block that had been missed when stats were kept during the game. But the coaches couldn’t provide an exact time stamp at first.
When the clip in question was found, K-State determined it was a legitimate block — not just a tipped ball.
The ninth block came with 8:56 remaining in the third quarter. Jones now holds the school record for blocks in a single game.
When she last spoke to reporters, she only thought she had tied it. She seemed proud of the feat.
“It’s really special,” Jones said on Wednesday. “I love it.”
This also means that Jones, who had 10 points and 10 boards against Lamar, finished a block shy of a triple-double on a night when she was one of three Wildcats to finish with a double-double.
In 2015, Breanna Lewis blocked eight shots against Kansas. She and Jones shared the record for less than 48 hours.
The added block gives K-State 12 total for its victory over the Lady Cardinals.
The Wildcats now have 42 blocks this season. The 6-foot-2 Jones has 19 of those, which is 10 more than 6-foot-4 Peyton Williams, who has the second-most blocks on the squad.
K-State head coach Jeff Mittie said “it’s hard to do” when speaking about Jones’ eight blocks against Lamar. The coach said Jones has a specific skill set.
“She’s got a good knack for it,” he said on Wednesday. “Good length — a little bit of surpris-ing length to some people at times. But she’s got a good feel for it. Then what I think she’s learned, worked hard the past couple weeks, is under-standing to roof plays as opposed to coming down.”
Vahe Gregorian: Kareem Hunt was a luxury, not a necessity, for Chiefs
vahe GReGoRian
Tribune News Service
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Too soon or not, let’s pause and go back to the football part of all this: With the tardy but essential dismissal of Kareem Hunt from the Chiefs last week, anyone assuming — through never-ending exasperating experi-ence — that a trap awaited even this seemingly charmed season might fig-ure it just sprung.
But consider this.In today’s pass-crazy NFL
and with everything else the Chiefs have in their favor, Hunt had been a lux-ury, not a necessity. That’s why, for instance, Bovada essentially didn’t even change the Chiefs’ Super Bowl odds from last week to this week (6/1 to 11/2).
No matter how much it might appear otherwise.
Yes, a year after leading the NFL in rushing last sea-son as a rookie, Hunt again was among the most prolif-ic and dynamic backs in the league. Moreover, his capacity for the spectacular was a key to the confound-ing dilemma presented by the highest-scoring team in the league.
Opponents had to pick their poison when contend-ing with Hunt, the fastest player in the league in receiver Tyreek Hill, a tre-mendous tight end in Tra-vis Kelce, a potent receiving alternative in Sammy Wat-kins and the emerging likes of Chris Conley.
All this, engaged and ani-mated by budding MVP Patrick Mahomes operating the joystick with spontane-ity and run-pass options.
And, yep, a dimension abruptly has been lost, per-haps symbolized by the
Chiefs now being at least momentarily relegated to their leading rusher being … Mahomes, with 238 yards.
“I don’t necessarily like running; I’m not too fast,” Mahomes said, smiling, as the Chiefs prepared to play Baltimore at home this Sunday. “But I like scram-bling around extending plays.”
Which, in fact, is the first crucial point here: Mahomes still will extend all of this in more ways than one, as we saw in the 40-33 victory over Oakland on a rather sluggish offen-sive day.
He will continue to be the catalyst, and he remains surrounded by an impres-sive array of playmakers in an offense that continually is being tweaked and con-toured to its strengths by coach Andy Reid.
Beyond that, for a sample of how the game has changed from grind to flight, consider that 29 of Mahomes’ 41 touchdown passes have been in the red zone, including 17 inside the 10-yard-line. That speaks to a fundamental modern change in the func-tion of the run game.
Then there is the matter of Spencer Ware, who will get the bulk of the work in the wake of Hunt’s release
(even though here’s hoping there’s room to get former running back Hill more car-ries), with Damien Williams and the recently returned Charcandrick West soon to fill in.
No, Ware doesn’t have Hunt’s ceiling on the field. But Ware clearly is an asset, not a liability, as he reminded last Sunday when he churned to carry three or four Raiders with him on one run and bulldozed through others for a touch-down on another.
That sheer toughness, his smarts with protections, knack as a receiver and understanding of the sys-tem mean that Ware will be sturdy and reliable and have to be respected by defenses … even if he isn’t quite a presence to be game-planned around the way Hunt often was.
This means a niche of his own, understanding, though, that part of that is an indirect acknowledg-ment that he isn’t his pre-decessor.
“We try to do that with every player, if we can, exploit their strengths and then work on their weak-nesses so that maybe those can become strengths for them,” said Reid, who play-fully declined to elaborate on what that might mean for Ware. “I don’t know
how else to answer it other than give you the play-book.”
It’s also worth remem-bering this. Just over a year ago, when the Chiefs dis-carded the injury-riddled Jamaal Charles, they expected to ride Ware, who had rushed for 921 yards on 4.3 yards a carry in 2016.
So Ware is right when he says “my film is my resume,” though as of the first drive of the 2017 pre-season opener the biogra-phy also included a torn MCL and PCL in his right knee. At that point, you might remember, many Chiefs fans figured that would be big trouble.
Then in stepped Hunt, the sixth running back and 86th pick overall in the 2017 NFL draft, numbers that reflect the diminished stature of the running back in today’s game. But he was a sensation on the field, and in that sense the Chiefs were a better team with him.
But the deeply disturb-ing video of him shoving and kicking a woman in February that became public last week, along with other news that has since surfaced, made him toxic.
Now, the Chiefs are absolutely better off with-out him in a broader sense, and his demise hardly means their season is sabotaged.
It remains to be seen how it will all play out, of course. But this team remains Super Bowl-cali-ber because Ware is better than many might realize, because this offense (and most others) aren’t built around running backs anymore, anyway, and because it has so much else going for it.
1B/Sports
