Friday night found the NCOE Fighting Cardinal basketball team heading to Thompsonville to take on the Tigers in their final regular season game of the 2015-16 campaign. Already having an earlier victory over the Tigers, most were expecting a repeat performance, but when the game is being played on the road with the home team celebrating Senior night, nothing can be taken lightly.
First quarter action was by far the lowest offensive performance of the season for the Fighting Cardinals as they were only able to register three points. Luckily for NCOE, the Tigers faced the same shooting struggles and matched this with three points of their own. NCOE did do a little better in the second quarter on the offensive end, but not by much when they added only five more points to their total. Unfortunately for the Fighting Cardinals, Thompsonville did manage to get their offense going somewhat as they tallied twelve points to claim the 15-8 halftime lead.
When second half action got underway, it was expected that the NCOE offense would finally get going, but shooting struggles remained. The Fighting Cardinals did manage to outscore the Tigers for the first time in the game, but only by three points to narrow the Thompsonville lead to four with one quarter remaining. The fourth and final quarter was the best yet for the Fighting Cardinals on the offensive end as they battled to get within one point of the Tigers with only seconds remaining. However, during these final seconds, Thompsonville managed to find the open man going long on an out of bounds play to put in the layup and extend their lead back to three. NCOE did have the final shot to tie and force overtime, but it fell short and the Tigers handed NCOE their fourth consecutive loss, 31-28.
Jake Delap topped all NCOE scorers with eight points. Others scoring for the Fighting Cardinals (15-12 overall, 6-4 GEC) were Cooper Wells six, Chase Sutton six, Dakota Bond five, Marcus Niehaus two, and Nolan Sutton one.
In Junior Varsity action, NCOE started out slow while Thompsonville did not, and at the end of the first quarter the Fighting Cardinals would find themselves trailing by eight. The second quarter was nearly the reverse of the first with NCOE picking up the defensive intensity to hold their opponent to a mere two points and narrow their deficit to only one at the halftime break.
Second half action would find the Tigers outscoring the Fighting Cardinals in each of the remaining two quarters to push farther ahead and hand NCOE the 36-27 loss. This loss dropped the JV squad to 3-13 on the season and 2-8 in conference play.
Trenton Verble led the way with 18 points followed by Will Travelstead with four, Evan Healy two, Jeb Baumgart two, and Colton O’Neal one.
