KALIDA – It was a tale of two halves when Kalida beat Leipsic 62-55 in boys basketball on Saturday night.
Actually, it was closer to a tale of two halves and an overtime when the Wildcats dominated the first two quarters and the extra session for their fifth win in their last six games.
Trent Siebeneck scored 16 points, Jeffrey Knueve had 13 points and Collin Nartker scored 11 points for Kalida (7-8, 2-2 Putnam County League).
Jordan Berger scored 18 points and Grant Schroeder had 15 points for Leipsic (9-6, 2-3 PCL).
Kalida jumped out to a 36-21 halftime lead, saw all of that lead disappear by early in the fourth quarter and had the last shot in regulation, but couldn’t put the Vikings away until overtime.
After trailing 14-13 in the opening minute of the second quarter, Kalida went on an 11-0 run on its way to outscoring Leipsic 23-10 in the second quarter.
“From an execution standpoint and a point total, that’s as sharp as we’ve been this year,” Kalida coach Ryan Stechschulte said about the Wildcats’ offense in the first half.
Leipsic obviously needed to do something to change the momentum in the second half and it found that something in its pressure defense.
Kalida turned the ball over only three times in the first half, but it had 11 turnovers in the second half.
“Our pressure finally started to get to them and we were starting to get into transition, which is what we wanted to do to them the whole game. But we couldn’t do in the first half because we weren’t getting stops,” Leipsic coach Chris Kuhlman said.
“I think we were sluggish but they played well, they played hard. Kalida is playing a lot better. We weren’t ready to go and they made us pay for it. We played our butts off for 20 minutes to finish the game,” he said.
Leipsic cut the Wildcats’ big halftime lead to two points by the end of the third quarter and tied the game four times in the fourth quarter. But the Vikings never got the lead.
Berger scored to tie the game at 52-52 with just under a minute to play in regulation.
Kalida put up two shots and a tip-in attempt in the final 54 seconds but wasn’t able to get the win in regulation.
But the Wildcats scored first in the O.T. on an offensive rebound by Nartker, never let Leipsic catch up and closed the game out at the free throw line.
“The discussion between the end of the fourth quarter, when we’d had a chance to win it, and the beginning of the overtime was basically ‘We’ve gotten this far, we’ve got an option to either step up and finish the game or fold.’ The seniors chose to finish the game,” Stechschulte said.
“We had some seniors make some big plays in the overtime and we were able to get one,” he said.
Kalida’s mid-season improvement has come from several factors, Stechschulte said.
“We’re practicing better. We’re getting a little bit better every week. We’re playing seniors, juniors and sophomores who have never played together and the seniors hardly played any varsity ball until this year. And then you bring in me with some new ideas and different terminology and some different ways of doing things.
“It took a while to mesh but the kids have been great. I think we’re starting to believe,” he said.
Kalida honored its 1997 Division IV girls basketball state champion team before the game.
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