MILL CREEK
Meadowdale will take a win over a division rival any way it can get it.
Thanks to that cutthroat mentality and a timely injury to Jackson star Brett Kingma earlier in the week, the Mavericks are still undefeated in the Wesco South.
Roger O’Neill scored 21 points, Connor Hamlett added 16 points and the Meadowdale Mavericks’ big men dominated a key stretch of the fourth quarter to defeat the Jackson Timberwolves 60-55 on Friday Jan. 9 for a Wesco South victory at Henry M. Jackson High School.
“I don’t care how we win,” Meadowdale head coach Chad McGuire said of narrowly defeating a Jackson team missing two of its starters. “Its a good win.”
Meadowdale post Kris Larson took advantage of a small Jackson front line to score or get to the line on three straight possessions with less than four minutes remaining in the fourth quarter and Hamlett iced the game by making two free throws with 3.3 seconds to go for the game’s final score.
“The free throws were big,” Hamlett said. “We shot a ton of free throws in practice, so it was routine for me. We all did pretty well at the line.”
Kingma, the Wesco South’s leading scorer at 20.1 points per game, broke the radius bone in his left arm in Jacksons 46-41 victory over Lynnwood on Tuesday. Kingma’s father told The Herald that the sophomore guard would have surgery on the arm, ending the season of one of Wesco’s brightest and most-heavily recruited stars.
“I’m proud that some of the guys stepped up,” Jackson coach Steve Johnson said. “We had our chances.”
“I’m disappointed (Kingma was hurt),” Hamlett added. “There’s a rivalry between us and Jackson and we don’t want them to have any excuses. (Kingma’s absence) probably helped us.”
Compounding Jackson’s misery, senior forward and leading rebounder Bryan Koch also missed Friday’s game after injuring his ankle last week.
But Meadowdale didn’t take control of the game until late in the fourth quarter.
Trailing by one point with the 6-foot-7 Hamlett sitting on the bench in foul trouble, senior post Larson scored five straight Meadowdale points to hand the Mavericks back a 46-50 lead. Larson finished with nine points.
“He stepped up big,” Hamlett said of his fellow post. “That was huge when I was out.”
If the injuries took some of the luster off a matchup of two of the Wesco South’s top teams, somebody forgot to tell the Jackson boys team about it. Jackson employed a zone to hang with a much larger Meadowdale team virtually the entire game and senior wing Tyler Cody put Jackson up 46-45 with just over four minutes remaining in the game off a steal and a layup.
Jackson’s junior guard Ryan Todd scored 23 points and narrowly missed a 3-point attempt with 5.9 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter that would have sent the game in to overtime.
“That Todd kid is a heck of player,” McGuire said. “Give Jackson credit.”
“He’s going to get a lot of attention with Kingma out,” Johnson added of Todd. “I thought for the most part he made good decisions, taking the ball to the basket.”
Todd scored six points in the fourth quarter, as did Cody.
“The key for us was getting the ball inside in the fourth quarter,” McGuire said. “Kris Larson did a great job of finishing and getting to the line.”
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