Berean pulls away for championship
MANHATTAN — Through three quarters, Berean Academy and Pittsburg Colgan battled so closely that even their stats were virtually identical.
But in the fourth quarter, the Warriors (25-1) stepped up their defense and went on an 11-0 run of more than five minutes, and rebuffed any Colgan comeback effort for a 44-32 victory in the Class 2A boys championship game at Bramlage Coliseum.
The title is the first for the Berean boys.
Lonnie Penner, Berean's senior guard, scored 16 of his game-high 18 points after halftime. He helped Berean stay in front by hitting all four of his free-throw attempts in the final two minutes.
Penner said an adjustment helped his free-throw shooting.
"We shoot plenty of free throws in practice, and at the end of the year I'd been missing some, so Coach (Lewis) Wiebe told me to change how I shoot them a little bit, and it's been working a lot better," Penner said.
Wiebe said his pupil had learned well.
"We haven't been a real good free-throw shooting team this year, but we hit them at the end," Wiebe said.
Colgan coach Vince Cichon, whose Panthers (22-4) were making their ninth straight title-game appearance and 10 of the last 11, said the turning point came at the end of the third quarter.
With 2.1 seconds left, Colgan guard Andy Farmer was called for a foul, his fourth, on Berean's Josiah Busenitz with the score tied 25-25. Busenitz hit the second of two free throws for a 26-25 lead, but Colgan capitalized on a Berean turnover at the start of the fourth quarter, and Christian Smith's layup gave the Panthers a 27-26 lead.
Cichon said the Panthers got stagnant in the fourth quarter.
"Chris got (called for) a charge, and Andy got (called for) a charge, then Andy gets his fourth foul just before the end of the third quarter, and that was a big emotional thing for us," Cichon said. "We were unable to regroup from that."
Wiebe agreed.
"When 3 (Farmer) and 41 (Jesse Watt, who fouled out with 1:49 left) were in foul trouble, that was huge, too," he said.
But again it was Penner — who propelled Berean out of the quarterfinals with a 37-point effort Thursday night — slipping behind Colgan's defense for a layup with 6:45 left that gave Berean the lead for good, 28-27.
Colgan came down and missed, and the Panthers would not score again until Smith's three-pointer from the left baseline with 1:25 left. In the meantime, Berean had scored 11 points, six by Penner, and had a 10-point lead before Smith cut it to 37-30.
"They're a scrappy team, they always control the ball and we were in it all the way until the third quarter, then we started pulling away, and things just went our way," Penner said. "We gave them a little too much penetration for what we wanted, but we got the job done."
"But he had a great state tournament."