By Michael Cignoli (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
ASH GROVE – Sam Moreland has made plenty of big plays during his time at Ash Grove, but even he finds it hard to imagine any of them topping the one that came in overtime on Tuesday.
“It’s probably going to be the most memorable one,” he said. “It was pretty awesome.”
For everyone who witnessed it.
Trailing Marionville by four points with only 5.3 seconds left in the final home game of his career, the senior converted a dramatic four-point play to force a second overtime — and the Pirates rode the momentum to a 78-75 victory in a battle of the Southwest Conference’s top two teams.
“It couldn’t have been a better ending,” Moreland said. “It was the best game I’ve ever played in.”
With two conference games remaining, the 10th-ranked team in Class 3 (19-3, 6-0) controls its own destiny as it looks to secure the school’s first outright conference championship since 1985.
The Pirates split first place with two other schools in 2006, their most recent conference title.
But they have struggled since winning a district championship in 2014 and had endured seven consecutive losing seasons, including a 1-23 record when this year’s seniors were sophomores.
“These guys come in every single day and just work their tails off to get better — and they have for a long time,” Pirates coach Grant Williamson said. “We’re not too far removed from being a team that didn’t win very many games and they’ve come in everyday and they work hard. They put up shots. They work on the defensive end. They work in the weight room. All of that work, that process is what makes games like this worth it. And it’s what makes wins like this so rewarding.”
With only three games remaining in the regular season, the Pirates have already guaranteed they will end the drought and finish the year with a winning record. Their play in those games — two of them against conference rivals — will determine whether they’ll secure the conference title too.
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If the Pirates win at Stockton (16-6, 6-1) on Friday, they’ll lock up at least a share of the championship. It could become an outright title if they get help from other schools that night.
The easiest way to ensure they’ll finish alone in first place is to defeat the Tigers on Friday and Pleasant Hope on Tuesday, which would make them the lone team to finish the year unbeaten.
“We set a goal at the start of the year,” Williamson said. “We felt like we could compete for a conference title. Obviously, you have to take care of business leading up to games like this one. But we had this one circled on the calendar. It’s a special game. Both teams like to compete against each other. Getting this win really puts us in a position to try to go win our conference.”
The only other team who entered Monday with a chance at an undefeated conference season was Marionville, but Moreland’s heroics prevented that. He led all scorers with 29 points – 10 of them in the overtimes – to deal the Comets (16-5, 5-1) their first conference loss of the year.
None of them came at a bigger moment than the four-point play.
The teams were tied 56-56 at the end of regulation, but Marionville split a pair of free-throws to take a four-point lead with 8.3 seconds left in overtime. The Pirates called a time out and Williamson drew up the one play they had specifically designed and practiced for such a situation.
Nate Trammell set the screen for Moreland to get open. Elijah Morrison made a quick pass, enabling Zane Delk to get it to Moreland beyond the arc.
“I was supposed to catch the ball and shoot it and hopefully they’d foul me,” Moreland said. “Sure enough, they did — and I happened to make the three.”
But that only made the score 64-63.
Moreland still needed to make the free throw, or that 3-pointer would have been essentially irrelevant. But there’s no other player the Pirates would have wanted in that position.
“The ability to go out there and despite the energy of the moment and the excitement of the moment and refocus himself, it’s been Sam all year,” Williamson said. “He’s been a guy that when things get tough, he finds ways to make plays. He never gets too high, but he also never gets too low. It’s allowed him to make a lot of big-time plays for us — and probably the biggest pressure free-throw a player could have.”
Moreland hit the free-throw with 5.3 seconds left and Marionville came up empty on its final trip down the court, sending the game to a second overtime. The Pirates scored first and never let the Comets take the lead, allowing them to work the clock and force Marionville to foul them.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t make a lot of our free-throws,” Williamson said. “Had we made some of those, it definitely would have lowered the blood pressure and helped us put that one away. But defensively, we really stepped up in that second overtime and got stops when we needed them.”
That included the final sequence of the game.
Moreland split his free-throws to put Ash Grove up 78-75 with 7.2 seconds remaining, plenty of time for Marionville to engineer some of its own heroics. But the Comets didn’t get a good look at the basket and a last-chance effort did not fall, prompting Ash Grove students to storm the court.
They could not wait to celebrate with Moreland.
For Marionville, the shot was a reminder of how games at this stage of the season can be decided by razor-thin margins and split-second decisions.
“It was just a bad play,” Marionville coach Rob Guerin said. “We didn’t execute it correctly. We end up fouling and he made the 3-pointer. It’s not what you want to happen, but then we didn’t respond very good in the next overtime, either. It’s things that we can learn from moving forward. We’re moving into districts and that’s the way we take it. It’s something we can learn from.”
Brady Nicholson added 28 points for Ash Grove, 15 of them in the fourth quarter and overtimes.
Wil Carlton scored 27 points to lead Marionville, including 11 consecutive free-throws.
Lake High added 20 points and five 3-pointers, three of them during a third quarter the Comets opened with a 13-4 run. That helped Marionville turn a two-point halftime deficit into a 40-37 lead at the start of the fourth quarter. But the Pirates responded with a 10-2 run of their own over the next two minutes to restore a five-point lead, which the Comets then erased to force overtime.
“That was a really, really good high school basketball game,” Williamson said. “Both teams made a lot of plays. Really good players just going back and forth, trading blows, making shots and getting stops. Neither team wanted to lose. Neither team gave up. We were fortunate to make just a few more plays and come out on top.”
