By Michael Cignoli (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
HARTVILLE – When class assignments were announced for the 2022-23 boys basketball season, the regular-season matchup between Hartville and Mansfield became exponentially more important.
Hartville’s move from Class 3 to the smaller Class 2 ensured there wouldn’t be another playoff matchup between the two Summit Conference rivals, but it also meant the Mansfield seniors would only have one more opportunity to make their mark on a rivalry that had become decisively one-sided.
“We had told them this is our last chance,” Mansfield coach Cody Shelton said. “This is their last chance. They were (winless) against them in their careers and this was their last chance to have a chance to beat them.”
The Lions made the most of the opportunity.
Tom Emerick led all scorers with 19 points, Landen Campbell added 10 more and the Lions snapped a streak of seven consecutive losses to their archrivals with a 38-31 victory in a defensive-minded matchup on Tuesday night at Hartville High School.
The losing streak was part of a longer stretch of woeful results in the Mansfield-Hartville rivalry, as the Lions were just 2-17 against the Eagles since the start of the 2011-12 season.
Hartville had also dealt Mansfield season-ending playoff losses in each of the past seven years, and had not lost to the Lions since suffering a one-point defeat on January 8, 2019 — when this year’s seniors were in eighth grade.
But none of that matters now, as the Lions bucked all the trends and prevailed in the lowest-scoring matchup between the rivals since at least 2009. The 69 combined points shattered the previous low of 78 established during the 2013-14 campaign.
“(Hartville does) such a good job,” Shelton said. “They’re so well-coached and dictate tempo so well. We knew it was going to be a tough game. On a night when we weren’t hitting shots – and credit to them – we were glad to be able to fight our way through it and find a way to win.”
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Low-scoring games are not uncommon for Hartville, which has scored less than 40 points in four of its 16 games — and won two of them, but this one was abnormally low by anyone’s standards.
The Lions led 13-12 at the half — which is not a typo — before beginning to pull away in the third quarter.
“If I wasn’t playing – if I had been watching the game – I’d find that hard to believe,” Emerick said. “Thirteen points in one half, that’s something different. That’s pretty low-scoring.”
Emerick was key to reversing the trend, as he scored nine of his team’s 12 points during the pivotal third quarter.
The Lions took a 25-19 lead into the final frame, allowing them to flip the script on Hartville and limit possessions, milk the clock and force the Eagles to foul.
Hartville never cut the deficit below 3 points and trailed by as many as 10 in the closing minutes.
“We talked about it going into this game,” Shelton said. “We wanted to get ahead where late in the game, they couldn’t hold the ball or just run the clock off on us. They’re quick. They have good guards. They hit free throws. You don’t want to be in that position late in the game against a team like that. Everybody knows it — and especially here at home. It was a key point for us to not get behind going late into the game. We were fortunate enough that’s what happened.”
The victory over Hartville (12-4, 1-2) in Mansfield’s conference opener is arguably the most significant one to date in a season that has seen the team race out to a 14-0 start.
“It’s just a constant back-and-forth battle every single game,” Emerick said. “For the past three years, it’s just they beat us every single time. This year, we wanted to hand it to them.”
But at the start of the game, it was the Eagles who brought that energy.
Feeding off the energy of a raucous hometown crowd, Hartville raced out to a 7-0 lead in the opening minutes before the Lions called a timeout to prevent the game from getting out of hand.
“It’s basically what we did not want to happen – let them get a lead where they can control tempo better,” Shelton said. “But like I told them, we just have to bear through it and find a way to get back in the game. If we take it one possession at a time, we’ll be fine.”
And they were.
That run represented about 22 percent of Hartville’s total offense in the game, as the Eagles managed just five points the rest of the first half and never led in the final two quarters.
“We got some easy stuff early off some of their defensive breakdowns,” Hartville coach Brett Reed said. “It felt like we had quite a bit of offense to get to that point to where we could get a bucket, but we knew they were going to make a run. They’re too good of a team to not make a run. Most games actually that we watched them play, they had been scoring and they’d be up 10 in the first quarter. That was a really big key for us to not let them get off to a fast start. We did our job there. For us tonight, we really struggled to score at times — and have at times this year — and that’s a credit to Mansfield. They really guarded us well.”
Jalon Cryer finished with a team-high 13 points for the Eagles, who hit six 3-pointers but lost at home for just the fifth time since the start of the 2018-19 campaign. They had been 28-4 over that stretch.
London Dennis, Chase Kelley and Chase Cartwright had three points apiece for Mansfield, which is now two wins away from matching its win total from the 2021-22 season.
Beating Hartville – ranked fourth in the latest statewide Class 2 rankings – could also boost Mansfield’s chances of cracking the top-10 list when the next Class 3 polls are released.
“It’s nice to obviously win the games, but our ultimate goal is later on to be able to compete for that district championship and play on further,” Shelton said. “We’re hoping to play our best ball late. I don’t feel like this was our best outing due to (Hartville), they did a great job not letting us play as well as we’d like to. I’m hoping to play well at the end of the year.”
Even if it wasn’t perfect, Tuesday’s result could help the Lions achieve those goals.
“We know we can beat a solid team like that with the big crowd and with a bunch of negative energy going against us,” Emerick said. “I think that shows that we can go through pretty much anything.”
MANSFIELD (14-0, 1-0) 7 6 12 13 — 38
HARTVILLE (12-4, 1-2) 10 2 7 12 — 31
