Berean Academy moves past Lyndon
MANHATTAN — Normally, a player scoring 37 points in a high school game — especially a state tournament game — means good things.
But when players from both teams score 37, it's the supporting cast that makes the difference.
Berean Academy's Lonnie Penner and Lyndon's Derk Banzhaf each had career nights, but Karlan Wiebe and Owen Beverlin helped Berean to a 73-62 victory in the Class 2A boys quarterfinals Thursday.
Tonight, the Warriors will face Salina Sacred Heart, which ousted Hill City 46-29.
"I've never had a game like that," Penner said. "I was relaxed, shot the ball well. The last two years we've come up here, we've been really tight offensively. This year, (now that) we've been here before, we were relaxed, we were comfortable and we shot the ball well.
"We were up 15 at half, I thought our defense would kick in and we'd put them away. But give credit to them, they shot the ball really well; No. 5 (Banzhaf) shot threes like crazy, and we had to fight to the end."
Berean coach Lewis Wiebe said that Penner hadn't scored this many points in a game.
"He's averaging 11 (points), if that tells you anything," Wiebe said.
A 15-point halftime lead was nice, Wiebe said, but there were still some things that weren't right.
"I thought we got off to a great start offensively, but defensively we just did not," he said. "That was my biggest disappointment of the first half."
Penner had 21 at halftime, but Banzhaf and Brown kept Lyndon (16-8) competitive with 11 points each.
In the second half, Banzhaf made five three-pointers among his 26 points.
"He (Banzhaf) started lighting it up, but we didn't do a good job of defending," Wiebe said. "We left him open there a couple of times at the end. We can't do that. We're better than that."
Penner had two points in the second quarter and four in the third before making 10 of 12 fourth-quarter free throws.
"They pushed out, and I thought we got a little bit tentative in the second half offensively, and that didn't help," Wiebe said.
Lyndon coach Michael Massey said he thought his team was tight in the beginning, and Berean was able to take advantage of that.
"We came out and our eyes were a little bit wide open," he said. "We turned it over a little bit, gave up some easy baskets that we normally don't and let them get going a little bit.
"When you let a kid get started like that, it's hard to get him stopped. He's a good player; we knew that coming in."
Massey said that once Penner began to hit his shots, adjustments were made.
"We just gave him too many easy ones to start with, and once we realized how many he had and what we needed to do to stop him, we just did a better job of stopping that," he said.
For Banzhaf, it was a thrilling way to go out, even though the outcome wasn't what he'd like.
"Great way to go out," he said. "Especially with these guys (his teammates). I love these guys, and I'm going to miss them next year."
"We knew we had to come back. We let them score 28 in the first quarter, and we knew we had to fight back, because that's the most we've given up in a quarter. We knew we needed to come back out ready to play, so that's what we did."
Pittsburg Colgan 63, Olpe 40 — Colgan (21-3) shot 68.4 percent in the second half (13 of 19) and pulled away from Olpe (22-2). The Panthers continually managed to find players breaking to the basket for back-door layups, and the Eagles were plagued by foul trouble, with three starters eventually fouling out.
Bradley Argabright tried to keep Olpe afloat, scoring 16 points in his final high school game. Jesse Watt scored 13 for Colgan, Zachery Smith had 11 and Christian Smith 10.
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