On paper, wildcat vs. wildcat sounds like a fair fight. But on Friday, when the Cats from Marmaton Valley met the Cats from Yates Center, the two teams seemed a species apart.
Let’s start with the boys.
Yates Center jumped out to an early lead, notching two quick buckets in the game’s initial seconds before applying a full-court press that produced an instant Marmaton Valley turnover. The game, at this point, appeared destined to go the way many had predicted, with the Wildcats of Woodson County running away with the easy W.
But the team from Moran wasn’t cowed. The next time up court sharp-shooter Caiden Elliott banged home a three-pointer and, on the subsequent possession, his classmate Isaac Heskett bodied his way to the basket for a lay-in, bringing Marmaton Valley within a bucket of the heavily favored home team.
At the end of the first quarter, it was Yates Center over Marmaton Valley 18-12 not bad. At the end of the half, Marmaton Valley was down by 15, 36-21, which is not great but not terrible either. You can come back from 15. But by the end of the third quarter well, OK, now it was kind of bad: Yates Center was up on Marmaton Valley 56-31. And by game’s end, if you’re Marmaton Valley, ouch. Yates Center stomped the visiting Wildcats 71-37.
THE PROBLEM was that the Yates Center Wildcats spent the entire halftime break inhaling a new energy, and came into the third quarter fired by a renewed zeal for points. And when I say Yates Center, I mostly mean Aaron King. The senior, who scored eight points in the first quarter and 10 points in the second, managed to sustain this number system by adding 12 points in the third. King ended up with 30 points on the night, and he did it while riding the bench for most of the fourth quarter.
And while no other Yates Center player scored in double figures, nearly every player who donned the blue and white on Friday ended up on the board: Reece Solander scored eight; Hadley Splechter had seven and so did Easton Reynolds; Kendrick Jones, six; Tyton Smoot, four; Cade DeWitt, Nolan Jones, Caden Graham, and Jaymond Rice had two apiece; and Connor Griffith sank a late-game free throw.
And while King was the unconquerable czar on offense, every single one of his Yates Center teammates turned it up on the other end of the court. Yates Center obviously hadn’t heard that President Trump had only that night signed a stopgap bill to reopen the federal government, because King and his crew kept up the shutdown defense from the first quarter to the last, finally limiting Marmaton Valley to a mere six points in the fourth quarter.
“We tried to make them shoot from the outside,” reflected Marmaton Valley head coach Jason Bauer. “But we didn’t do a very good job. They got the ball into the high post, and anytime you get it in there on a 2-3 [zone defense], you’re pretty much killed.”
However, in the plus column, said Bauer: “We didn’t give up. We played with heart tonight. I know that in other games I’ve questioned that. We’ve just got to learn to play as a team.” Back to the minus column: “Right now, there are a lot of ‘me’ players on this team.” Still in the minus column: “You’ve heard me say this a thousand times, but we suck at boxing out. Yates Center out-rebounded us by probably 25. We’ve been working on boxing out all week, but it’s a bad habit that we can’t seem to break.”
Back again to the plus column: Senior Caiden Elliott. “He was under the weather tonight, but I don’t think he missed a single shot. I think he was five of five. Caiden is one of those unselfish players that needs to learn to try and get his own shot sometimes. He’s your player that is all about the team, who always puts the team first.”
Elliott ended the night with 14 points, including four three-pointers. Senior Gage Griffith added 11; Heskett ended the night with five; and William Lowder had four.
Marmaton Valley travels to Altoona-Midway on Tuesday. Yates Center plays host to Crest.
