COLORADO SPRINGS – Winning a game – any game – in the Pikes Peak Athletic Conference requires a team to play sound basketball for all four quarters. Neither Pine Creek nor Liberty boys basketball were able to do that so their league tilt on Tuesday simply came down to who was going to win the fourth quarter.
And it was the Eagles who stepped up in a big way. They found some offense and held the Lancers without a field goal for the entire eight minutes to get a 54-40 win, just their second league win of the season.
“The one thing we told the guys was that records don’t matter for this game,” Pine Creek coach Joe Rausch said. “Nothing was going to come easy. We had to hang in there and eventually we started to click and we found five guys on the court that were getting after it defensively.”
They just waited until as late as possible to find that group. The Lancers (4-7 overall, 2-1 PPAC) pushed the ball up the floor and found open shots early. Their first two baskets of the game came on 3-pointers from Will Grantz and Isaha Ballard, but they allowed the Eagles (6-5, 2-2) to go on a 7-3 run to tie the game after the first quarter.
Liberty took a two-point lead into halftime thanks again to some clutch shooting. Landen Dvorsky knocked down two big baskets, scoring five of his team-high 11 points in the quarter, to help seize that momentum. But he was most proud of what the Lancers were doing on the other end of the floor.
“I think we played great defense,” he said. “Our defense was actually really good, especially in the first half.”
They pushed the lead to 31-28 after the third quarter, but that’s when things changed drastically. Joseph Apuron knocked down a 3-pointer to immediately tie the game, then the Eagles went into attack mode. They forced their way toward the basket more than they did at any point in the first three quarters and were rewarded with free throw attempts.
“We’re a more physical team,” Alex Esterle said. “We just tried to play our game the first three quarters and then in the fourth we played a lot more physical and got a lot more aggressive.”
Esterle was the beneficiary of that aggressiveness. He shot 17 free throws in the fourth quarter alone, sinking 10 of them. He finished with a game-high 17 points, 16 of which came in the fourth quarter. He sank enough to get the win, but the team 53.8% from the charity, a number that they won’t be happy with anytime soon.
“I wasn’t holding my follow through going up,” Esterle said.
The Eagles got the win in the end. Rausch has been waiting for his team to find a level of consistency that they’ll need to contend in the PPAC, but the one good takeaway he has from Tuesday’s win is that his team struggled for three quarters but came through in the fourth to get a win.
“Liberty is always going to bring it when they play us, and that’s just part of the game,” Rausch said. “Could we have played better offensively and defensively in those first three quarters? Yeah, we could have. But part of it is what Liberty did. They were real tough and they didn’t make it easy on us.”
