RIVERTON — Iola High’s boys entered Friday’s Class 3A Substate opener cautiously confident about their chances.
“I felt good about where we were mentally,” Mustang head coach Luke Bycroft said. “I felt good about our practices, what we’d asked them to do, and how they responded.
“But then the game started, I thought, ‘Maybe not.’”
Host Riverton jumped out of the gates like a rocket, opening a 13-4 lead by the midpoint of the first quarter.
“But we settled in,” Bycroft said. “There were some nerves in a game like this, and we settled in.”
Iola clawed back to within three late in the first quarter and took the lead for good on Cortland Carson’s 3-pointer midway through the largely controlled the game from there in a 68-59 victory.
The win puts Iola two wins away from a Class 3A State Playoff berth.
Standing in the way is a Substate semifinal Wednesday at Caney Valley, a 70-19 winner over Cherryvale. Tipoff is at 7 p.m.
The key to Friday’s win, Bycroft and senior forward Lucas Maier agreed, was Iola’s ability to get key rebounds against Riverton’s towering front line.
The Rams’ Terryk Richardson — listed at 6-10 — had eight points by the middle of the first quarter, but only seven the rest of the way.
The responsibility to guard Richardson and his other towering forecourt teammates fell on Maier, Grady Dougherty and reserves Tre Wilson and Jordy Kaufman.
“If they passed to our guys, we’d slide over and another defender would come over the double team,” Maier explained. “That really kind of shut them down in the post. Obviously (Richardson) is gonna have a lot of length over us, but having that double-team really helped us a lot.”
But that was only half the battle.
“It was a matter of effort, hustle and wanting every ball on the floor,” Maier said. “If the ball was down there, get after it, dive 10 feet if you have to.”
Nowhere was that as evident as a sequence late in the half, when Iola’s Nick Bauer and Cortland Carson were pressuring the Riverton guards at midcourt. Carson poked the ball free,while Bauer made a diving save, flipping the ball to a streaking Wilson for the layup, pushing Iola ahead, 25-20.
“Once we settled in, we really did control the game the rest of the way,” Bycroft said.
