By Drew Goodman / Scrimmageplay.com contributor
Though it was not their biggest comeback of the season, Friday night’s tilt between Charlottesville and Western Albemarle represented the Black Knights’ most exciting fourth quarter of the 2016-17 campaign.
Trailing for roughly 95 percent of the game heading into the fourth frame, CHS outscored Western 24-11 in the final eight minutes to wrap up a 73-63 triumph over the rival Warriors.
With the win, the Knights close out the season with a 10-4 mark in Jefferson District play. The victory snaps Western Albemarle’s 14-game winning streak, and denies the Warriors a share of the JD regular season title.
Western and Charlottesville will do battle once again in the semifinals of next week’s district tourney.
“It was good to get revenge from last time when we were at their place,” said Charlottesville guard Sam Neale. “It’s good to get some confidence at the end of the regular season and going into the postseason.”
Neale led the Black Knights with 19 points, with 16 of them coming in the second half. Western Albemarle’s Ryan Ingram led all scorers with 38 points, including five three-pointers.
Friday’s win marked a role reversal of the two teams’ first meeting in Crozet last month, when the home standing Warriors trailed for much of the game, only to prevail in the final two minutes.
This time around, the Knights were the ones knocking down some timely buckets and seizing control of the 50-50 balls.
Though Charlottesville took control of the game in the final quarter, the second-to-last possession of the third planted the seeds for a big final eight minutes.
Trailing by six with time winding down in the frame, Neale drilled a second-chance triple from the top of the key, to trim the deficit in half heading into the stretch run of the game.
After Jaylen Hudson tied the game with 7:29 to play, senior Patrick Ronayne dialed long distance to put the Knights ahead 55-52, and send the nearby student section into a frenzy.
Though Ingram did everything that he could to keep his team in the game from the foul line, the backcourt quintet of of Neale, Hudson, Ronayne, Jordan Brown, and Immanuel Wells overwhelmed the Warriors down the stretch.
After Ingram cut the Charlottesville lead to three points for the final time, Wells hit in two of his seven fourth-quarter points from the charity stripe to give Charlottesville a multi-possession lead for good.
A layup by Garrett Payne with less than a one minute remaining proved to be Western Albemarle’s lone filed goal of the final quarter.
“I was just telling everybody to lock down on defense; my teammates helped me out by hitting big shots, and I was just trying to create and get them open so we could pull through,” said Hudson of the big fourth quarter.
Hudson was one of four double-digit scorers for the Black Knights. The senior guard tallied 16 big points, while Ronayne finished with 14, and Brown turned in 11.
In addition to coming up big on the offensive end, Hudson certainly slept well on Friday evening after chasing Ingram around on defense for most of the contest. After watching stalwart point guards Jordan Saylor and Caleb Gage attempt to tame Ingram for the past several years, Hudson got his final regular-season crack at Western’s all-time leading scorer.
Ingram looked like a man possessed in the first quarter. The senior buried his first three attempts from beyond the arc, and was in double figures after just six minutes and change gone by.
Though he eventually cooled down from the field, Ingram spent the rest of the evening knifing through the Charlottesville defense to get to the free throw line. Western had a difficult night shooting the ball after the first quarter, but Ingram hit a remarkable 21 of 22 attempts from the charity stripe to keep the Warriors ahead for the bulk of the contest.
“[Ingram] is a good player; he can beat you off the dribble and he can beat you on the three-point line,” said Charlottesville head coach Mitch Minor. “He has a high IQ for the game, so we just tried to wear him down a little bit. We switched a little bit… we tried to deny him the ball and work him as hard as he could. It’s tough to stop somebody like that.”
Ingram’s hot shooting helped spark a 10-0 Western run in the first quarter, which helped the Warriors reach their largest lead of the game at 18-8. WAHS led 37-30 at intermission and again stretched its lead to seven late in the third, before the Knights got hot from three-point range.
Western’s Jed Strickland finished with eight points in the losing effort.
