By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
SALEM, Ore.– Sprague really rose to the occasion on Thursday night to open the Capitol City Classic against 5A Powerhouse Wilsonville at Willamette University.
Inexperienced at the Varsity level to start the year with two players returning from last year’s 6A State Placing team, the Olympians overcame a slow start to the game against the Wildcats, the Olympians built an 28-23 halftime lead. Sprague connected on three three-pointers, two fromTayshawn Juarez and another from Elijah Schmidt that gave the Olys some pip in their step going into the second half.
“We started the season off slow, but we’ve worked the last week and we’ve been building off of it. This is our best game I’d say,” said Schmidt. “We’ve had slow starts from our guys, just getting used to the Varsity level. Lane (Isham), Llyod (Kuria)and London (Butler) really stepped up today scoring, rebounding, and playing good defense. We all played collectively good overall.”
They traded blows with Wilsonville in the second half. The Wildcats, led by longtime coach Chris Rocha, just kept challenging Sprauge to play perfect basketball. And overall, the Olympians did just that as the game was tied at 42 after three quarters. Coming down the stretch, both teams were in a mad dash to the finish line to make sure they had the lead.
“The first quarter, it was a little bit sloppy at the beginning, we picked it back up. We watched a lot of film and did a lot of preparation to make sure that we did really well on offense,” said Kuria. “We played a really good game, we know what we did right and we just got to fix what we did wrong. We’ll watch film tomorrow and get better,”
Sprague looked like they had the upper hand with 2.1 seconds remaining when Schmidt hit a mid-range shot from the free throw line, but a crazy full-court heave by Wilsonville and lay-in at the buzzer allowed the Wildcats to walk away with a 60-59 game. Capping an intense game as the two squads go their separate ways in the tournament.
Schmidt led Sprague with 19 points, Kuria finished with 13 points and Tayshawn Juarez contributed another 10 points in the defeat as the Olys will play the loser of Central-Ruston of Louisiana on Saturday at 1:30pm at Willamette University. Wilsonville, who will play the winner of that Central-Ruston game, will play Saturday at 4:30pm. Aazzee Breaux led the Wildcats with 15 points.
