‘They were just one step ahead of us’: Knights gain early edge, fend off Hornets in sectional semfinals

WHITE HALL, Ill. — As the minutes ticked off the clock and the goose egg stayed on the scoreboard, the frustration for Jackson McNeff and the Brown County boys basketball team continued to mount.

“It just felt like we couldn’t shoot the ball in the ocean,” said McNeff, a sophomore forward.

For the first 9 minutes, 5 seconds of Wednesday’s Class 1A North Greene Sectional semifinal against Edwardsville Metro-East Lutheran, the Hornets missed 11 straight field goal attempts and turned the ball over six times, digging a 13-0 hole before Carter Havens’ fastbreak layup with 6:55 left in the second quarter.

That crater proved too deep to dig out from. The Knights ended Brown County’s season and advanced to the sectional championship game with a 59-40 victory at the North Greene High School gym. The Knights will square off with Greenfield-Northwestern for the sectional crown at 7 p.m. Friday.

“They kind of just beat us at our own game,” said McNeff, who led the Hornets with 13 points. “They were just one step ahead of us the whole time.”

Metro-East Lutheran (21-11) had little trouble, especially in the first quarter, dealing with the Hornets’ helter skelter defense. The Knights made their first five field goal attempts and scored seven points off three straight Brown County turnovers to start the game.

“They were able to play content and hit some open shots when they had them,” Hornets senior guard Maverick Henry said.

Knights senior guards Jr. Brown and Thijson Heard were focal points of Brown County’s game plan coming into the game, but Hornets coach Jeff Bottorff said Brown, the Knights’ shifty point guard, handled the Hornets’ pressure well.

“We knew they were going to be tough,” Bottorff said. “Their guards are so good. It’s a hard team to pressure when they have a guard like Brown who’s not only quick, but he handles the ball well, sees the floor well, sets up a lot of guys. Even when we tried to double, we just couldn’t contain him. We thought we could take some risks on some other guys, but it didn’t really pan out.”

On the other end, Bottorff credited the Knights for their defensive intensity, which he said got the Hornets a bit off-kilter.

“They did a good job defensively of getting into us, being physical,” Bottorff said. “We thought they might play some zone, and they did, but to their coach’s credit, they did a good job of amping up some pressure, and we got a little rattled with the ball.”

The Hornets may have been a bit flustered, but they did not panic.

“You just have to calm down and know that you’re better than that,” freshman guard Michael Kassing said. “You have to put the past behind you and move forward.”

The Hornets’ trimmed the deficit to 20-12 by halftime and to six a minute into the third quarter.

“I felt like going into halftime, if we could get to under 10, we were within striking distance because we’ve been there a couple times this year,” Bottorff said. “That was my message, ‘We’ve been here before. We know what it’s going to take now.’” 

But after Havens’ steal and layup that made it a 22-16 game, the Knights scored six of the next seven points to stretch the lead back to 11 and led by as many as 22 in the fourth quarter.

“Every time I felt like we were on the verge, they did a good job of finding guys underneath to finish at the basket, or they got a rebound and a hoop, and we could never get through that,” Bottorff said.

Bottorff said the gravity of the moment finally caught up to the Hornets (25-10), which featured just two seniors and 10 underclassmen and beat Jacksonville Routt, the eighth-ranked team in Class 1A, in overtime to capture the Griggsville-Perry Regional title on Feb. 28.

“It’s tough when you go from the week they had last week and all the accolades, and people are really excited,” Bottorff said. “They’re all hard-working, gritty kids, but it makes the moments even bigger. I thought last week, we did a good job of handling big environments, kind of feeling like the underdog, and I think this week, we seemed a little more nervous.”