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By John Miller
Springfield, MO – It took the Marshfield Blue Jays 16 minutes to find their identity, but they found it just in time.
After trailing by 14 points at halftime (30-16), the Blue Jays rallied to force overtime, and upset eighth-seed Crane 58-55 in the opening round of the Blue and Gold Tournament on Monday morning from Hammons Student Center.
Jarrett Paoni scored 18 points for the Jays, while Britt Hill and Austin Porter each added 12 points. Porter finished with 13 rebounds.
“We went through the motions in the first half,” Marshfield coach Damon Seiger said. “Everything that we preached not to do, we did.”
Marshfield (4-5) struggled with Crane’s 2-3 trapping zone, which collected seven first-half steals and forced 10 turnovers.
“That’s what they do,” Seiger said. “That’s the first time this year we’ve seen that type of pressure. I think it took us 16 minutes to get acclimated to that even though we tried to put them in as many situations as we could in practice the past couple of days. It took us a little bit of a transition to get where we needed to be, but once we got there, we were fine.”
Crane (6-3) made seven of 10 3-point attempts in the first-half, building its lead to 30-16 at the break. Braydon Cook led the Pirates with 16 points. Tyler Campbell added 12 points, and Dalton Hayes had 10 points for Crane.
“We played unselfish,” Crane coach Craig Campbell said. “We passed the ball a lot, tried to hit the open guy, and got the ball up the floor. We played the way we wanted to.”
That all changed after halftime. Marshfield began the third quarter on a 7-1 run and didn’t allow a Crane field goal until the 2:13 mark of the period.
“We’re still pretty young,” Campbell said. “When we missed some shots in the third quarter, we got tight. When we got tight, we got away from playing the way we want to.”
The Pirates shot just 23 percent from the floor after halftime (6 for 26).
Marshfield continued its rally in the fourth, leaning on the play of Hill and Paoni. Hill’s bucket with 1:52 remaining closed the deficit to 42-41 and, after a pair of Hayes free throws, Paoni sunk a 3-pointer to tie it 44-44 with 1:12 to play.
Crane had the ball with six seconds remaining and a chance to win it in regulation, but Hayes was called for a traveling violation at the top-of-the-key as time expired.
The Pirates had the ball at the end of overtime, too, trailing 58-55 with 14 seconds to play, but two off-balance 3-point attempts by Hayes and Colton Elder fell short ahead of the final buzzer.
“We’ve been in two other overtime games this year and been on the bad side of things,” Seiger said. “It’s one of those things where we’ve been there before. It was nice to take earlier experiences already in this young season and learn from them. We had a similar situation this year against Aurora when we were up three with 17 seconds left and found a way to give the game away to them.”
Marshfield out-rebounded Crane 40-23 and had 14 offensive rebounds.
Marshfield will now meet Blue Division top-seed Republic at 9:30am Tuesday in JQH Arena. Crane will face Mount Vernon at 9:30am in Hammons Student Center.
Marshfield 10 6 13 17 12 58
Crane 10 20 4 12 9 55
Marshfield: Paoni 18, Hill 12, Porter 12, Kanengieter 7, Letterman 4, Villines 3, Atkison 2
Crane: Cook 16, Campbell 12, Hayes 10, Vaught 9, White 4, Elder 4
