Lima Central Catholic’s Matthew Quatman drives against Perry’s Andrew Nanchoff during Saturday’s game at Perry. See more high school basketball photos at LimaScores.com.
Don Speck | The Lima News
Lima Central Catholic led the entire second half and most of the first half on its way to a 71-52 boys basketball win at Perry on Saturday afternoon.
The Thunderbirds (4-4) put four scorers in double figures and a fifth player was just a point short of joining them.
Carson Parker’s 17 points led LCC. Willie Foster had 13 points, Parker Judy scored 12 and Matthew Quatman scored 11. Billy Bourk had nine points and 10 rebounds.
Elijah Caudill led Perry (5-8) with 17 points and Isaiah Sanders scored 13 points.
“We played hard for 32 minutes and we knew coming in here that if we took care of the ball we could shoot lay-ups and good shots,” LCC coach Frank Kill said.
“Defensively, when they were down 60 percent of their starters we thought that we had a opportunity to take advantage of that. They had kids out with an injury, transfer protocol and team issues.”
Perry had a one-point lead late in the first quarter and another one-point lead in the early going in the second quarter. But, other than that, the lead belonged to the Thunderbirds.
LCC was up 34-27 at halftime and did let its lead drop below 10 points the last quarter and a half of the game.
Defensive pressure played a significant role in the lead growing to almost 20 points by the end of the game. Perry had 23 turnovers in the game and 21 of those came in the first three quarters.
“We played for 32 minutes and played smart and intelligent. Those are things high school players struggle to do over a consistent time. I thought we shared the ball extremely well tonight. We passed with precision, we played very smart at time. Other times we played like we didn’t know how to play basketball,” Kill said.
“We rebounded extremely well. Defensively, we held Ayden Simpson to eight points. It’s a five-on-five game and when you can take advantage of 94 feet and make it into a transition game and turn it into lay-ups, that’s a really good formula. I thought our press could pressure them into some turnovers for easy points for us. We probably got 15 or 16 points off that.”
LCC shot 44 percent on field goals (24 of 55) and 79 percent on free throws (19 of 24). Perry hit 47 percent of its field goal attempts (22 of 47) and connected on 27 percent of its free throws (3 of 11). LCC had a 29-23 rebounding advantage and turned the ball over 15 times.
