Posted: January 28, 2013
By GREG BRILL
Special to The Winchester Star

STEPHENS CITY — Give Sherando’s boys’ basketball players credit for not being satisfied with a double-digit halftime lead.

Against James Wood on Saturday night, Sherando might have seemed comfortable with a 10-point lead at the break until you consider that the Warriors scored just four points over the last four minutes of the first half and had not pushed the “sealed” button just yet on another Northwestern District win.

When they gathered in the locker room, the Warriors addressed what needed to be done a bit better to finally pull away from the last-place Colonels.

Getting back to sharing the ball was paramount over anything else, and another third-quarter blitz on an opponent finally took care of the objective for Sherando. Senior forward Aaron Miller led four double-figure scorers for Sherando with 27 points, and the Warriors scored 49 second-half points on their way to routing the Colonels 94-74 to gain a season sweep of their rivals.

With Millbrook’s 66-59 win at Handley on Saturday, Sherando (12-5, 5-0 Northwestern) now has a two-game lead over the Pioneers and Judges in the district race.

The Warriors took care of things on their end by thrilling the home crowd with a 13-0 burst in the third period that got the lead out to 26 and flushed whatever drama was left. Miller capped the run with an easy basket, and Sherando had a 67-41 lead with 1:56 left.

Getting to the rim became a regular routine for Sherando in its 26-point third period, which saw the team make all eight of its field goals in close and cash in on free throws (10 of 11) when a foul came.

“We let them hang around [in the first half], and that’s our fault,” said Miller, who made 12 of 16 shots from the field (3 or 3 on 3-pointers). “We can’t let that happen again, especially against teams like Millbrook and Handley that are going to press us too.

“At halftime, coach [Garland] Williams told us that we were being selfish with the ball and that’s how we were [having] turnovers — we were trying to dribble through the press and that’s how the turnovers were taking place. He told us that we could make our jobs a lot easier and that we would not get tired as much if we just pass to our teammates to get easy points.”

Sherando still finished the game with 22 turnovers (one more than James Wood), but just three of that number took place in the third, and good play elsewhere far outweighed the only real negative in a game in which the Warriors set a season-high for points (the previous best of 92 came in the first meeting with the Colonels).

The Warriors, who led 71-50 at the end of the third period and never let their lead slip under 17 in the fourth, shot 50 percent or above in all four quarters. Sherando finished shooting 56.9 percent (37 of 65) from the field, 6 of 11 (54.5 percent) on 3-pointers, and 70 percent (14 of 20) at the line.

To begin the game, a 14-2 run in the first quarter established an early double-digit lead for Sherando, and nine points from senior guard Taylor Loudan (16 in the game, with six assists) and eight from Miller had the lead at six by quarter’s end. Miller scored nine in a second period that saw the lead shoot up to as much as 18 before James Wood managed to cut it down to 10 (45-35) by the half.

Even in the final seconds of the first half, the Colonels had to have a feeling that it was going to be another tough go in the district. Loudan quickly raced down and leaped high to swat away Cam Butler’s layup attempt. Just seconds later, Brett Lewin looked to get a buzzer-beater to fall, but the shot was disallowed by the officials.

Throughout the game, James Wood had a hard time picking up hot shooters for Sherando. If it was not Miller, it might be Loudan, senior guard Tanner Ruths (12 points, six steals, five assists) or junior guard Isaiah Williams (12 points, team-high seven assists) having spurts scoring the ball.

On the other side of things, the shots could not fall well enough for James Wood, which shot 31.3 percent overall and 21.7 percent (10 of 46) from 3-point range.

Senior forward Michael Carter had 17 points to lead the Colonels, Butler scored 14, and Ryland Williams had 11 to go with five steals and seven assists.

“We didn’t shoot the ball well the whole game, and I thought Sherando played pretty well,” James Wood coach Al Smith said. “Their personnel — they have some very good ballhandlers — seems to be problematic sometimes for a team that plays system basketball like we do. At the same time, I don’t think we executed on offense as well as we could. Defensively, we weren’t aggressive enough off our traps. The one thing we really talked about was not allowing dribble penetration, and they seemed to get to the rim whenever they wanted to.”

Sherando coach Garland Williams was pleased to see his team buy into the message of sharing the ball better in the second half. The Warriors had 25 assists as a team in winning for the 10th time in 11 games.

“I thought that most of the time we closed out on [James Wood] well,” Williams said. “We tell them that once we get a rebound, get on down [the floor] and find people. It’s not like saying ‘OK, you just run up and down.’ If you get in that [type of] game, they’ll knock down shots on you. So, we felt a little better after what we saw in the third quarter from them. They made adjustments.”

Senior center Demontay Harrison is no longer with the Warriors. Harrison, who had given the Warriors quality play in the low post, had transferred to Sherando from a high school in the Austin, Texas, area before this season and became eligible just after Christmas. Williams said Harrison returned to Texas earlier last week and is not expected to return to Sherando.