Ottawa-Glandorf’s Dave Westrick fires a pass to his teammate as Bluffton’s Marek Donaldson (0), Carson Soper (2) and Terron Boblitt (4) play defense Wednesday night at the Northwest Division III Boys District Tournament at Lima Senior High School.
Jackelyn Johnson | The Lima News
There are a lot of ways to describe the pressure defense Ottawa-Glandorf’s boys basketball team plays but probably one word says it best.
Relentless.
That’s the word Bluffton coach Todd Boblitt kept coming back to after the Titans won their Division III district semifinal 63-42 over the Pirates on Wednesday night at Lima Senior.
“They’re just so relentless. They’re always on you,” Boblitt said. “It’s just really hard to handle. You break it and they’re going to do it again.
“I think it just wears you down physically to some degree but also mentally. You have to be checked in for 32 minutes,” he said.
Add 10 3-pointers by the Titans (21-3) to that defense and you have recipe for success on Wednesday night and a lot of other nights.
Colin White scored 20 points, including four 3-pointers, to lead O-G’s scoring. Caden Erford and Levi Unterbrink had 10 points.
Bluffton (16-9) got 10 points from Carson Soper, the only senior on its roster.
Ottawa-Glandorf will play Spencerville (21-2) on Saturday for the district championship. The Bearcats won 44-39 over Liberty-Benton in the other semifinal at Lima Senior on Wednesday night.
The Titans led only 12-10 two minutes into the second quarter before they outscored Bluffton 11-2 over the next three minutes, with the last two points coming on White’s second dunk of the evening, to go up 23-12.
By halftime, O-G’s lead was still 11 points, 28-17, and it never dropped below 11 in the second half.
“I thought that run at the end of the second quarter was a really big one because we had three starters with two fouls,” Ottawa-Glandorf coach Tyson McGlaughlin said.
Boblitt said, “We had a couple of mistakes that resulted in points. They can balloon a game from a one or two possession game to a four or five possession game in a matter of 30 seconds.”
Ottawa-Glandorf’s defensive pressure seemed to bother Bluffton more in the frontcourt than in the backcourt and some of that was by design.
“You’ve got to be able to mix it up and that’s something we try to do,” McGlaughlin said. “The point of our press is really to wear the legs out. If we get turnovers, that’s great. We want turnovers. But that’s not the end all. We want the tempo, we want the game to be up and down.”
O-G defeated Bluffton 63-33 in early December in the Titans’ first game and the Pirates’ second game.
“They could have named their score in that game,” Boblitt said. “Our kids grew up a lot and Ottawa-Glandorf has gotten better too. I thought we were much more competitive tonight. I felt good about how we progressed over the course of the season.
Spencerville 44, Liberty-Benton 39
The Bearcats jumped out to an 8-0 lead in the game’s first 2 ½ minutes. After that the game turned into a defensive struggle.
Spencerville led 21-14 at halftime before Liberty-Benton took its first lead of the game at 31-30 in the final minute of the third quarter.
Spencerville led 42-39 when L-B’s Carson Conaway put up a 3-pointer with two seconds to play but it missed and Josh Henline was fouled. He sank two free throws for the 5-point final margin.
Dylan Smith led Spencerville with 16 points.
“They were pretty good defensively, they did a really good job of taking us out of our offense and what we were trying to do,” Spencerville coach Kevin Sensabaugh said about Liberty-Benton. “We missed some shots we normally make and that happens. That’s just the way it goes, when you’re playing good teams, it’s hard to score. It was kind of what I expected.
“We’ve got a pretty veteran group. When they took the lead it wasn’t the end of the world.”
Spencerville is in a district championship game for the second year in a row. It was runner-up to Marion Local in a Division IV district last season.
“That’s pretty cool. It’s not something we take for granted,” Sensabaugh said about going back to back in district championship games.
Henline said, “We all just stayed together, didn’t do our own thing and we climbed back and got on top. We were ready to get back here because we lost it last year, especially with the prediction of the O-G matchup, so we’ve been excited about it all year.”
Looking ahead to the matchup against Ottawa-Glandorf, Sensabaugh said, “To slay the dragon we’re going to have to play a lot better than we did tonight.”
