Wood River senior Kevin Her-nandez goes hard into the lane during Wednesday’s league game against the Canyon Ridge Riverhawks in Hailey. Express photo by Roland Lane |
Seniors at Hailey’s Wood River High School and Carey School will be saluted tonight during “Senior Night” games on the Hailey and Carey hard-woods.
Wood River’s boys’ varsity (3-16, 2-8 league) will host the 3A Gooding Senators (9-10) for a non-conference rematch that will also honor seniors Eron Bates and Kevin Hernandez. Host Gooding won the first clash 63-62 in overtime Dec. 10.
First place in the 1A Divi-sion 2 Northside Conference is at stake when the Carey Pan-thers (11-8, 7-0 league) host the defending league champion Dietrich Blue Devils 15-3, 7-0). Luis Garcia is Carey’s only senior.
Both Blaine County teams, along with the Community School boys of Sun Valley, start their post-season conference tournaments next week.
Riverhawks defense stymies WRHS boys
Credit the in-your-face Can-yon Ridge Riverhawks man-to-man defense for seizing control of Wednesday’s Great Basin Conference game with Wood River from the outset and win-ning their first conference game of the season 47-39.
The Riverhawks (1-18, 1-9) applied tenacious full-court pressure and held Wood River (3-16, 2-8) without a field goal for the first 10 minutes in building a nine-point lead. With a sweet-shooting fresh-man hitting his spots in the second half, Canyon Ridge made the early lead stand up.
Ninth-grader Bailey Hiebert tallied 13 of his game-high 18 points in the second half to lead the ‘Hawks. Helping out was point guard Keion Peterson (15 points, 8 rebounds, 3 steals, 2 assists), who yanked down six rebounds in the fourth.
Both teams shot poorly, 29% from the field, but Hiebert swished two 3-pointers to none at all for Wood River, and Can-yon Ridge was 15-for-26 from the free throw line (58%) com-pared to Wood River’s strug-gling 11-for-26 (42%).
Two players had excellent games for coach Andy Miles’ Wolverines. Bates (7 points) was relentless on the boards and finished the night with a season-best 20 rebounds. Jun-ior guard Arthur Brugger (12 points, 2 steals) picked up the cold-shooting Hailey offense with 10 points in the second half.
Wood River out-rebounded Canyon Ridge 37-30, but couldn’t duplicate its 58-43 road win over the ‘Hawks Jan. 24.
Hailey assistant coach J.C. Nemecek said, “Canyon Ridge’s full-court pressure caused the team to go into a faster pace than is comfortable to them and the result was poor shot selection and ineffective offen-sive play.
“They had recovered some composure by halftime, but the lead that Canyon Ridge had built by then proved to be the margin that varied only little for the rest of the game.”
Other contributors were Cody Carter (8 points, 6 re-bounds, 3 blocked shots), Con-nor Hayes (6 points, 2 boards), Jon Scott (3 points, 2 steals), Alec Nordsieck (2 points, 2 re-bounds, 3 steals, 1 block) and Parker Bingham (1 point, 2 re-bounds).
After tonight’s Gooding game, No. 5-seeded Wood River will prepare for its first game of the GBC tournament Tuesday, Feb. 18 at 7 p.m. against the No. 4-seeded Minico Spartans (5-13, 4-6), in Rupert. The teams split two regular-season games, each winning on their homecourt.
Top GBC seed is Twin Falls (16-3, 10-0), winner of 14 con-secutive games including Wednesday’s 57-29 road win at Minico. Burley (15-4, 8-2) clinched the No. 2 seed Wednesday with a 51-41 home win over No. 3 Jerome (11-9, 6-4). Jerome hosts Canyon Ridge in another first-round game Tuesday.
Winner of Tuesday’s Minico-Wood River game advances to play Twin Falls next Thursday. If Wood River and Canyon Ridge lose their first-rounders next Tuesday, they will have a rematch next Thursday.
Cutthroats wrap up home season
Led by hot-shooting brothers Doug DuFur and Daniel DuFur, the Community School Cut-throats gave the Richfield Ti-gers a big scare Wednesday on “Senior Night” in the Fish Tank gym on the Sun Valley campus.
Richfield (10-9, 6-2 league) trailed 41-34 after three periods but used a 23-point fourth quar-ter to stave off the Cutthroat upset bid 57-50. Four Tigers hit double figures—Lino Rivas (16 points), Victor Robles (12), Eric Beezley (11) and Zak Wood (11).
Sophomore Daniel DuFur tallied 18 points including four 3-pointers for the Cutthroats while senior Doug DuFur (two 3s) added 10 points. Other scor-ers were Garrett Rawlings (8), senior Taylor Adler (8), Alex Feldman (4) and Keegan Whitelaw (2).
The Cutthroats (5-10, 2-6 league) travel to Camas County today, Friday, Feb. 14 for the non-conference regular-season finale in Fairfield. Game times are 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. today.
Today’s games will finalize the seedings for the Northside Conference 1A Division 2 tour-nament starting Tuesday, Feb. 18 with an eighth- and ninth-place play-in game.