WILSON — Fans from both teams were sitting on edge waiting to see who would come out on top of a battle for first place in the Niagara-Orleans League.
Medina (9-0) and Wilson (10-0) entered the game undefeated. There is still half a season to play, but the winner would sit alone atop the N-O standings.
The teams had fought to a 39-39 tie through three quarters and it was a seesaw game for most. Medina had a big lead that evaporated, but Wilson expended energy on its third-quarter comeback.
In the end, the Lakemen had more juice to squeeze, outscoring the Mustangs 27-6 in the final frame. Ryan Hough’s two rim-rattling dunks provided the exclamation point on Wilson’s 66-45 win to take possession of first place in the league standings.
“It’s nice to be in that spot, opposed to not being there first,” Wilson head coach Brett Sippel said. “But it’s only 4-0 and our league is really tough. So it’s nice to be in that spot, but we have a long way to go and our league is so competitive that every night there’s going to be a lot like this.”
The first half was all about Medina though who took an 18-point lead thanks to hitting their shots and Wilson coming out cold. In the opening 16 minutes, the Lakemen only made six field goals and went 5-for-9 from the free-throw-line. But, the hosts chipped away and brought it to within 13 at 31-18 heading into the intermission.
During the break, the Wilson locker room was calm, they knew they would be all right. Sippel reassured his team that they were fine, that they could do this and that they needed to continue to be a resilient group that now has five comeback wins this campaign.
In the first two quarters, Wilson’s leading scorer, Aidan Neumann — who averages 24.2 points per game — was held to nine points. But, he would not be held down forever. He knew that he needed to make an impact in the second half if his team was going to win and he did just that.
Neumann scored 26 points in the second half, including going 11-for-11 from the free-throw line to help his team get the win. But there might not have been a bigger sequence in the season to this point for the senior than what he did late in the third quarter.
With just over a minute to go in the third quarter, Wilson’s Aidan Neumann crossed his defender up, causing him to fall and splashed a wide-open 3-pointer to bring the deficit to within one at 37-36. Neumann wasn’t done there, cashing in another triple on his team’s next possession to take their first lead of the contest at 39-37.
“I knew I had to make a play to get us back in the game,” Neumann said. “I had a feeling that something was going to happen, so just to see that go in like that (it) got me going, got the whole team going. The fans really pushed us over the lump as a group mentally and just it was cool. It was really cool.”
But Neumann’s heroics might have never come had his team not taken a charge on Medina’s leading scorer, Jerrell Nealy, early in the third quarter when the Lakemen were down by 16. Nealy, who averaged 20 points per game for the season, finished the game with six, all of which came in the first half. It was Nealy’s third foul and he ultimately fouled out with four minutes remaining.
“He’s a tremendous player for them and a great athlete and he’s been like that a long time for Medina,” Sippel said. “So that was a big play in the game. No question about it, drawing that charge against him was a big momentum shift for us.”
After splashing six 3-pointers in the first half, the Mustangs could not buy a basket in the second half, only hitting three 3-pointers.
“We started off good. But we wasn’t humble,” Nealy said. “If we was humble we probably would’ve stayed playing good but we wasn’t humble. So we started playing bad. We started getting in our heads, that’s stuff we got to work on.”
Christian Moss led Medina with 16, while teammate Preston Woodworth scored 12 points. Hough had 14 for the Lakemen.