Boys basketball: Woodland rolls to lopsided road victory over host Leland

LELAND - The Woodland boys basketball team was competitive in all of its four games at the recent Marseilles Holiday Tournament despite going 1-3, but according to coach Connor Kaminke, the Warriors struggled shooting the ball at times and couldn’t seem to find a way to finish out games.

During Tuesday’s game against host Leland, Woodland exploded out of the gate, scoring the contest’s opening 17 points on 8-of-10 shooting and eventually rolled to a 76-22 victory over the Panthers on Dick Inman Court.

“We really just wanted to see some shots fall tonight,” Kaminke said of what his biggest key coming into the game was. “We struggled really all four days in Marseilles of consistently making shots when we needed to make them. We struggled a little bit shooting from the outside and even when we got to the rim we didn’t convert as well as we should have.

“Tonight, while we didn’t take a lot of shots from the perimeter, I was pleased with how we were able to get to the basket and then finished.”

Woodland (5-11) led 27-2 after the opening eight minutes and held a 46-6 advantage at halftime against the youthful Leland squad, which committed 28 turnovers in the opening half. The Panthers start two juniors and three sophomores.

“We’ve unfortunately been on a (COVID) pause for well over a week, so we’ve had very little practice time,” said Leland assistant coach Mike Brown, who was filling in for head coach Pat Torman. “We talked in the pregame about coming out playing with fire, especially on our home floor, which obviously we didn’t do. It’s been something we’ve talked about all season, and we just didn’t come out ready to go.

“We also talked about taking care of the basketball, which again, we didn’t do a very good job with.”

The Warriors — who finished hitting 53% of their shots from the field — saw all 13 players who took the floor find a way into the scoring column, led by Keegan Boldt’s 13 points. Chris Stasko had 12 points and five rebounds for Woodland, while Phoenix Cooper added 11 points and four rebounds, Jon Moore 10 points, and Carl Sass (five steals) and Nick Plesko (three rebounds) five points each. Glen Ruff paced the squad with four assists.

Sophomore Evin Hensley had six points and five rebounds for Leland (1-6), with freshman Gunnar Nelson netting five points and junior Ian Cameron grabbing three rebounds and blocking four shots.

Woodland — using a 2-2-1 full-court defense — received six points each from Stasko and Boldt in the opening five-plus minutes to hold the aforementioned 17-point lead. A pair of free throws by Alex Vergara snapped the streak, but the Warriors would go on to score the quarter’s final 10 points, including six by Moore.

“That defense is something we’ve really worked on this year, and we are hoping can be our go-to defense,” Kaminke said. “It isn’t necessarily a defense that we expect to get a ton of turnovers off of, but we want to be able to slow teams down and take advantage of the trapping areas in it. The hope is to use that defense to keep the game’s tempo where we like it, but also to be able to get some easy points out of it if the opportunities come up out of it.

“We were able to do both those things out of it tonight.”

The visitors opened the second stanza with four free tosses by Ruff and back-to-back drives by Carter Ewing and Cooper to push the lead to 33 points.

“We have such a young and inexperienced group, and at times we lack confidence,” Brown said. “They see openings when they are there, but it seems like they are just a second too late to either make a pass or take a shot. The kids continued to play hard and scrapped until the end, but we just didn’t take care of the ball well enough to be in a competitive game tonight.”