PREP BOYS HOOPS: Sweet Relief
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And then there was basketball.
Quite possibly the biggest calm after the storm occurred Thursday night at Duff-Kingston Gymnasium in Eldorado when the community of Harrisburg needed something, anything to quiet the mind.
The relief that many needed came in the form of a 56-49 Class 2A Sectional Semifinal victory over Benton that will send the Bulldogs into the Sweet 16 and the Sectional Championship game on Saturday at 2 p.m. against Pinckneyville.
No doubt the transpired events have taken its tool on the Saline County community following Wednesday's early morning F4 Tornado that claimed lives and wrecked havoc, but Harrisburg head coach Randy Smithpeters has maintained that's his lone efforts has been to provide a bight light in an otherwise dark time in the town of Harrisburg.
"One of the things we talked about was how big this game was to the community of Harrisburg," Smithpeters said. "I thought the greatest part of the game was the last 10 seconds when all of the people from Harrisburg - and there isn't one soul here tonight that wasn't affected - but when all those people stand up, cheer and clap for what I call, 'our boys', but I just noticed this out of this disaster, when people have approached me and talked to me, it's been 'are our boys ready to play tonight?" That's what we want to be is Harrisburg's boys and maybe put a little bit of a bright light in a dark spot."
The win moves Harrisburg's record to 27-5 and ties for the most wins under Smithpeters as the Bulldogs look for their first sectional win since the 2000-2001 season.
Harrisburg nearly led wire-to-wire against the Rangers, trailing early 5-3, but then took a 6-3 lead and never looked back.
A big part of that was the play of junior guard Capel Henshaw who lit the Rangers up for a game-high 22 points including 17 in the first half as Harrisburg worked diligently to move a 19-14 first quarter lead into a 37-28 lead at halftime.
Benton would get as close as two-points in the second half when Cody Smith drilled a 3-pointer to get the Rangers to as close as 39-37, but Harrisburg closed out the quarter on a 6-2 run to make it a 45-40 contest going into the game's final eight minutes.
It was a stall-like offense for the Bulldogs in the fourth quarter, who despite just going 7-of-14 from the free throw line, held the Rangers to just 3-of-9 shooting from the field and matched them with nine total points.
It wasn't a philosophy that Smithpeters admitted he was all to fond of, but with Harrisburg leading by as many as nine points, it was one he felt safe instrumenting.
"What we wanted to do was make them defend and basically run our offense and look for ways to score," Smithpeters said. "I think we were looking for ways to score for a good while, maybe not the last three minutes or so, but when they came out and started fouling, it made it a little more evident that maybe we better just hang on and run some clock. Our intentions were to run the offense and look for the good shot.
"I thought early in the game, which we tend to do, we fired up shots too quickly. We didn't make our opponent defend. We've been guilty of that in the past and this time of the year you don't want to make those kind of mistakes."
Harrisburg finished the contest going 19-of-33 from the field and 4-of-14 from behind the arc. The Bulldogs finished 12-of-22 from the foul stripe and outrebounded Benton 20-11.
Eli Taborn-Scott backed up Henshaw with 14 points on 6-of-6 shooting from the field, while Tyler Smithpeters finished with 12 points to also reach double figures.
Dakota Upchurch had four points, while Caleb Goldman tacked on two.
For Henshaw, the Bulldog junior was 9-of-11 from the field and went 3-of-5 from beyond the arc, while pulling down a team-high 10 rebounds.
"Capel is a tough matchup for a lot of people and tonight was a tough matchup for Benton. He came down with some big baskets, but that's something that he can do. He can hit shots early and make them expand. I thought Dakota Upchurch helped us when he was in the game. He's a big force in there and did some big things for us."
Smithpeters and Harrisburg now have their eyes set on Saturday's matinee matchup with the Panthers, a team they did not face from the Mississippi Division of the River-to-River this past season.
"The No. 1 thing on our board was defense and the No. 1 thing on our board for Saturday will be defense. It's something that we have to do. I thought we got off to a decent start, but in whole, the first half one of the very first things we wanted to defend was the three-point shot and we give up five or six three-pointers in the first half. That's exactly what we didn't want to do. Saturday afternoon is going to be the same idea. (The Panthers) have shooters. If you leave people open, they will make shots. We know we have to step up and defend a little bit better than that. Perhaps a lot better than that."