By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
AURORA, Ore.– The legacy of Kaiden Ford continued Friday night in Cascade’s 68-56 victory over North Marion.
His 36-point output in the game helped the senior surpass the 1,000 career point total. The milestone was nice, but it’s not something that he was totally chasing with his sights on something bigger with his team.
“It’s a cool little achievement. Thanks to my teammates who helped give me passes to me, trusting me, but it’s not all that matters. It’s a team sport, I can’t do it all without any of those guys,” said Ford. “It’s a little achievement, but we’re fighting for the big goal.”
And Friday was just another day closer to the goal at the end of the road. The goal for both teams actually in the always tough Oregon West Conference.
Entering the slate of games Friday, five of the six OWC teams were ranked in the Top 13 in 4A. Four were in the Top nine in the classification with the Cougars, ranked second, and the Huskies, ranked ninth playing one another on this particular night.
Cascade pushed speed. North Marion turned to their scrappiness and athleticism to combat the Cougars. The first half alone, the Huskies, didn’t back down to the fight. Down 8-4, they came back to take a brief 9-8 lead. Cascade pushed ahead 13-9, the Huskies cut it to 15-13 before a Ford three made it an 18-13 game going into the second quarter.
Cascade was able to pace the second quarter, but North Marion was still right there going into the halftime break down 29-22.
“It’s a battle. We got four teams in the Top 10, so we got to come prepared every night. Starting off league, we haven’t started so great, but we’re ready to fight through the next six games,” said North Marin’s Cade Hartenstein.
A 9-0 Cascade run to start the second half had the contest on the brink of possibly getting out-of-hand up 38-22 two minutes into the third quarter. But that was when the Huskies started to string a few things together. Their defense picked up, their offense began to hit some shots, and a minute into the fourth quarter, it was now a 48-39 Cascade lead with plenty of game left in front of both squads.
North Marion High School is just one of those tough places to play just because of the environment that the gym presents to the other team. It’s tight. The crowd is right there, and it can get pretty rowdy as it was Friday night.
“This is definitely the toughest league in the State, in my opinion. Just take it one game at a time, especially here. It’s a tough environment. We don’t usually play the greatest here,” starts Ford. “So just focusing on practices and just making sure we’re crisp coming into gametime and control what we can control. We did a good job. We could’ve done a better job defending the three in the second half. We had chances to close it out in the third and didn’t exactly do that. Just focusing on closing it out a little earlier and not giving them life.”
Cascade weathered the storm and kept the Huskies’ rallies to that nine-point spread at three separate times in total during that fourth quarter to close out the victory.
“We just got to come back. We still got a ton of games ahead of us, we got Stayton coming up next week, and we got to be ready for them. Work hard in practice and everything to get better,” said Hartenstein. “Defense. We’ve been trying to work on that and getting everything looking clean and offensive stuff. But I think we’re doing a good job. If we hit some shots, we can win some games. “
Hartenstein scored 20 points in the game for North Marion. Reece Hartenstein scored 14 points with four three-pointers, Lucas Fowler scored 13 points, also with four three-pointers. North Marion heads to play at Stayton on Tuesday.
Knox scored 18 points for Cascade, and Hunter Anundi scored another nine for the Cougars, who will host Sweet Home on Tuesday.
Photos By Jeremy McDonald
