Wolverines headed to state basketball

ATLANTIC - “I was like, please go in.”

That was the thought running through Noah Meyer’s mind as he put up a potentially game-tying shot with under a second to go in regulation of East Mills’ Class 1A substate final versus Nodaway Valley.

After bouncing around the rim, Meyer’s request was answered and his shot fell through the hoop, sending the game into overtime where the Wolverines out-scored Nodaway Valley in the extra-frame 7-6 in a 66-65 victory in Atlantic Saturday. The win puts East Mills into next week’s state tournament at the Wells Fargo Arena.

Meyer’s putback bucket came as the Wolverines had one more chance with 4.3 seconds to tie the game and extend their basketball season. Michael Story received the inbounds pass and immediately took the shot, which Meyer ended up snagging.

“The play was not designed for the Story kid to get the ball, but when he got it, he attacked,” East Mills coach Kevin Schafer said after the game.

Story’s shot missed, but both Meyer and Keegan Wederquist were there to help with the rebound.

“We both went up for the rebound and he got it before I did,” Wederquist said.

With time running out, Meyer immediately shot the ball.

“I thought (Michael Story) was going to make it, unfortunately he didn’t. He told me to go for all the rebounds I could get and I got them,” Meyer said.

In overtime, East Mills struck first thanks to a Wederquist lay-up with 2:53 to go.

“When we e took them to overtime,” Wederquist said. “We knew we could get this game.”

Meyer followed up again with another basket with 1:05 to go and soon East Mills had a 63-59 lead.

Nodaway Valley struggled to score during the extra frame.

East Mills guard Jacob Schafer was fouled and sent to the line with 26.4 seconds to go. Schafer made both free throws to push the Wolverines’ lead to 65-59. The Wolverines got the ball back again following a Nodaway Valley miss and Schafer was fouled with 12.1 seconds to go. He made one of two free throw and to make the lead 66-59.

“I don’t know how sure they were before the game, but you could see the confidence grow as the game progressed,” Coach Schafer said. “They were believing as the game went on that we could play with these guys.”

Nodaway Valley’s first points of the overtime came with 5.8 seconds left as on a three pointer trim the lead 66-62. An East Mills turnover on the ensuing inbounds play immediately gave Nodaway Valley they wasted little time getting another three-pointer trim the lead 66-65 with  2.5 seconds to go.

“My heart sank a little bit,” Wederquist said of watching Nodaway Valley hit their second three pointer in the final 10 seconds. “There was still time left on the clock, I knew we had to get it done.”

The focus for East Mills was to get the ball inbounds, preferably further down the court and try to run off the final ticks with Story throwing it in.

“Story’s job was, if somebody was wide open, get them the ball, and otherwise just heave it,” Schafer said. “Noah’s job was to make sure it doesn’t go out of bounds.”

Story launched a hail mary down the court and Meyer was able to grab the pass and the junior was quickly fouled with 1.2 seconds left.

“I just wanted to keep it in the court,” Meyer said.

Meyer missed the front end of the 1-and-1, leaving little time for Nodaway Valley to get up court and fire off a desperation heave that clanged off clinching the win for East Mills.

“It feels amazing. We talked about it at the beginning of the season and we kept our hopes up and we got here,” Meyer said.

For the first four quarter, East Mills had gone back and forth with Nodaway Valley leading by as many as nine in the first quarter. But the Wolverines recovered to score 14 of the next 17 points to take a 22-20 lead at the end of a wild first quarter.

“We were fortunate that they cooled off,” Schafer said about the early Nodaway Valley scoring.

Nodaway Valley worked out to another lead during the second quarter. A scary moment occurred during the quarter as Wolverine guard Logan Currin rolled his ankle with more than five minutes until halftime. Currin sat out for a few minutes, but returned later in the game.

“I’d take a hurt ankle for state any day,” Currin said.

Hobbled with the injury, Currin was able to power through when his team needed him, scoring key buckets during the third and fourth quarter.

“He asked out a couple of times, but he ran right back in, he just needed a breather. He gutted it out,” Schafer said of his junior guard. “Fortunately, it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t play, because I don’t know if we could have done it without him.”

Currin, who along with Wederquist scored a team-high 14 points, also had the unenviable task of guarding Nodaway Valley senior T.J. Bower, who entered Saturday averaging a team-best 20.3 points per game.

“Having him on defense against was tough, but I did what I had to do to get the win,” Currin said.

This will be the first state tournament appearance for East Mills, the result of a 2007 whole-grade sharing agreement between Malvern and Nishna Valley. Nishna Valley last made the state tournament in 1993. Schafer was the head coach of that team that lost a first round to eventual state champion Hudson, 66-59.

“I was a new coach, not a very good coach, to be honest with you,” Schafer said. “We just had so much talent. With the tradition Nishna Valley had at the time, I thought well, I’ll be back. It won’t be many more years before we’re back.”

Twenty years after that state tournament Schafer and his Wolverines will open the Class 1A state tournament on March 10 against an opponent yet to be determined.  Three Class 1A substate games were postponed until Monday night due to weather.

East Mills 48,
Sidney 28

It’s hard to imagine the East Mills basketball team having a better start in its Class 1A, District 14 final.

The Wolverines opened the game on 14-2 and held Sidney to more turnovers (six) than field goals (two) in taking a 17-4 lead after a quarter.

From there, East Mills’ lead swelled to as many 25 in the second quarter as the Corner Conference champs cruised to its first ever district title with a 48-28 victory in front of a reporter-estimated 750 in Treynor.

“We turned the ball over twice in the last 30 seconds of the first half but other than that, we played an almost perfect first half,” said East Mills coach Kevin Schafer after the game. “I was disappointed in how we came out in the second half, we didn’t handle their pressure well and we had too many turnovers. We didn’t shoot it as well the second half.

“Luckily we still played defense and kept them off the boards to keep them from coming back.”

The Wolverines were red-hot from the opening tip. Five different players scored in the 14-2 opening run. It was more of the same in the second quarter with Logan Currin, who scored all 15 of his points in the first half, hitting his third three pointer of the opening half to push the Wolverines’ lead to 30-5 with 2:28 to go.

East Mills led 36-12 at halftime.

The Wolverines didn’t come out in the second half with the same fire as the first and it showed on the court. Schafer said he thought his team lost a little focus and didn’t deal with Sidney’s full-court pressure as well as he’d hoped.

Jacob Cain’s 13-footer from trimmed the Wolverines’ lead to 38-19 with 3:38 to go but that was as close as Sidney would get over the final 10:38 of the game.

As good as the Wolverines’ offense was the first half, their defense may have been better in the second half. Credit some of that to the Wolverines’ preparedness (it was their fourth meeting with the Cowboys this season) and good old-fashioned effort on the defensive end. Sidney’s 28 points was just one point better than their season low, which came in a 35-27 loss to these same Wolverines Jan. 25. As a team Sidney shot a dismal 24 percent for the game and Cain, who entered averaging a team-best 17 points per game, finishing with just eight points on 4-of-16 shooting.

“He missed some shots he’d hit on us before. They were off. We talked about before the game how they’ve kind of struggled against us in the previous three games so we talked about having a good first quarter and getting in their heads, ‘Oh, no, here it comes again.’ That kind of helped us. They just missed a lot of the shots I’ve seen them make.”
Sidney coach Kent Larsen mined deep into his defensive playbook to slow the Wolverines, running a box-and-one on Jacob Schafer, a triangle-and-two, zone and man-to-man defenses with little avail.

“They tried that earlier against us in one other game,” Schafer said. “The problem was, when we’re shooting like that, I don’t think we’ve had that many different kids hit outside shots for us, it forced them to switch up their defense. I just didn’t care for how we handled their pressure in the second half.”

Keegan Wederquist led the Wolverines with 17 points and 13 rebounds. Schafer chipped in eight points.
Sidney closes out its season with a record of 18-7.

East Mills 58,
A-H-S-T 53

Trailing 36-35 heading into the final quarter, East Mills coach Kevin Schafer gathered his team in a huddle and told them to do what they hadn’t done all game long: get the ball inside.

They listened and it worked.

The Wolverines opened the fourth quarter on a 10-0 run, with eight of those points coming on layups, got the momentum back and hung on late with six free throws in the final 34 seconds for 58-53 victory over A-H-S-T in the Class 1A, District 14 finals last Tuesday in Farragut.

“We were shooting too many jumpshots and going one-on-one too much on the perimeter and we don’t do that  a lot. Tonight we were,” said East Mills coach Kevin Schafer after the game. “When we started going inside to Keegan they started double-teaming him pretty hard and that’s when Noah (Meyer) started going to work.
“Then we got in foul trouble and Keegan had to come out and that ended that little run. But we had a good thing going there for a while.”

East Mills led 28-24 at halftime before the Vikings staged a comeback. A three pointer by Daulton Maassen and a runner by Steven Jacobsen sandwiched around a Wolverine turnover handed A-H-S-T it’s first lead since early in the game midway through the third quarter. They would lead 36-35 heading into the final frame.

The Wolverines opened the fourth quarter determined to follow Schafer’s instruction to get the ball inside to top post scorers, Wederequist and Meyer. Wederquist rattled off three straight layups and a 12-footer and Meyer added a layup to cap a 10-0 run to grab the Wolverine’s lead back at 45-36 with 4:41 to go in the game.

But the Vikings wouldn’t go down so easily.

After A-H-S-T trimmed the lead to 45-40, the Wolverines’ Logan Currin hit a three to push the margin back to 48-40.

But East Mills’ celebration was short lived as Wederquist was whistled for his fifth foul on the ensuing possession, ending the Wolverine junior’s night with 14 points.

The Vikings responded with an 10-4 run to trim the lead to 52-50 with 54.5 to go. With two fouls to give, A-H-S-T was forced to foul and burn valuable clock time. The Wolverines’ Currin went to the line with 34.1 remaining where he hit both free throws to make the score 54-50.

A-H-S-T responded 10 seconds later when Jacobsen nailed a three pointer from the top of the key with a hand in his face to cut the lead to 54-53 with 24.3 remaining in the game.

On the ensuing possession, Currin was again sent to the line and the junior guard made both to put the lead to three with just 21 seconds left. But after a Vikings timeout, a long three was off and Jacob Schafer pulled down the rebound and the senior hit both free throws to ice the win.

“We had some things happen that were unfortunate that fourth quarter,” Schafer said. “Keegan (Wederquist) picking up his fourth and fifth fouls was big. I was happy he handled it pretty well and got off the court. I was a little nervous we were in a bit of a hurry and had some turnovers late but we hit our free throws and gave up a three pointer when we were right there with great defense. But, fortunately they missed their next one. I’m very proud of the kids.”

Currin lead East Mills with 17 points. Meyer added 15 off the bench.

Drew Young paced A-H-S-T with 18 points and eight rebounds. Lee Whyte added 16 points and five rebounds.

East Mills (21-3) advances to the Class 1A, District 14 finals against Sidney (18-6) in Treynor Thursday night. Tip-off is set for 7 p.m.