By Brennan Stebbins (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
With less than five minutes remaining in Saturday night’s championship game, Chadwick sophomore Creek Guerin drove into the lane and threw up an alley-oop off the backboard for senior Clayton Garrison to finish with an emphatic slam dunk.
It was that kind of night for the Cardinals.
Chadwick turned up the heat defensively in the second half and took control with a 17-0 run in the third quarter en route to a dominant 57-32 win against Mt. Vernon for the 55th annual Stockton tournament title.
“These guys just keep doing it,” Chadwick coach Shawn Guerin said. “They’re just a resilient group. They keep pushing ahead and we just keep battling. We got off to a slow start tonight, which we’ve done that the last couple games really––we get off to a slow start and kind of get rolling once our defense gets going. And then that play, that’s those guys having fun. They do that in practice a lot.”
The Cardinals (13-5) won the Stockton championship for the second year in a row and held the Mountaineers (11-6) to their lowest scoring output of the season in the process. But, as late as the 7:35 mark in the third quarter, Mt. Vernon trailed by only three points after playing to an 11-all tie in the first quarter and a 20-17 deficit at the half.
A 3-pointer by Mt. Vernon’s Jarrett Zerby made it 23-20 in that first minute of the third quarter––but then the Mountaineers didn’t score again for nearly four-and-a-half minutes in the midst of Chadwick’s 17-0 spurt. A 3-pointer from Gentry Gilbert made it 40-20 with 3:15 left in the third, and another Gilbert 3––his third of the period––ended the quarter with a 49-25 score.
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Gilbert’s 9 points in the third led a 29-point scoring outburst for the Cardinals. Garrison added 7 and Tristan Smith and Prestin Kinyon each added 5.
Garrison, who opened the second quarter with a dunk, opened the fourth with a 1-handed slam and added the alley-oop about three minutes later. He scored all eight points in the fourth quarter for Chadwick.
“To hold a team like Mt. Vernon––Coach Worley does a great job over there with those guys––I told them coming in it’s going to be a battle,” Guerin said. “Those guys can play, Mt. Vernon is a good group. I thought we were sluggish, and their defense is good, too. Props to them, they gave us trouble but then once our defense got where it needed to be and we kept putting pressure on them and turning it over some it kinda got us going there.”
Mt. Vernon turned it over four times in the third quarter and was held scoreless for seven-straight possessions during Chadwick’s big run.
The Mountaineers opened the game with a flurry of 3’s, though, to make things interesting. Zerby, who made four 3-pointers in the game, had two in the first quarter and Hunter Dawson made another to help their team out to an 11-3 lead before Chadwick rallied to tie it with help from 3-pointers by Garrison and Guerin. After the first basket of the second quarter, Chadwick never relinquished the lead.
Mt. Vernon was led by Zerby’s 12 points. Dawson and Luke Robbins each scored 7, Julian Hernandez scored 4 and Lucas Schoen scored 2.
For Chadwick, Garrison led with 26, Tristan Smith scored 10, Gilbert scored 9 and Guerin and Kinyon each scored 6.
“We’ve gotta play good, this is where you’ve got to be playing well, the end of January rolling right into districts a few weeks away,” Guerin said. “We had a tough schedule early on. We haven’t been home, we’ve just been out playing. We want to play good competition everywhere we go and Mt. Vernon was sure enough a good competition, a good game for us.”
