By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
Sylvan Hills got a pair of easy conference road wins over Helena-West Helena Central on Tuesday. The boys got very little resistance from the Cougars in a 74-47 victory. The girls got even less resistance, winning 54-21.
The Sylvan Hills boys (18-5, 8-0) had to force the issue when the Cougars (6-12, 3-5) decided to shorten the game. The home team got the opening tip, set up on offense, pulled the ball out toward center court and stood.
That drew Sylvan Hills out of the zone it started the game in. When they went man-to-man and stepped out on the ball, the pace of the game changed.
Still, HWHC hung tough for a while. Sylvan Hills lead was only 19-12 at the end of the first quarter. By halftime the lead had doubled. Sylvan Hills then came out of halftime with a 16-4 run and soon after invoked the mercy rule.
“Tuesday night was probably our best display of what we’re trying to get accomplished on the basketball court of the whole season,” Sylvan Hills coach Kevin Davis said. “Our game plan, our philosophy is to be able to score on the break, get great spacing and score inside and out. We executed all of that pretty well on Tuesday. All our parts came together and when they do, it makes it awfully tough on our opponent.”
The evidence for Davis’ analysis is in the box score. Senior leading scorer Archie Goodwin had a season low 21 points. Trey Smith hit three, three-pointers and finished with 14 points. Post player Larry Ziegler had 10 points and led an inside game that posted 25 points in the paint. Senior Devin Pearson and sophomore David Johnson accounted for the points Ziegler did not get.
Lady Bears’ coach Shelley Davis wasn’t pleased at halftime of the girls game, but was glad to see her team respond to her challenges in the third quarter and pull away for a 54-21 victory.
“I’m pleased other than the fact that if you can handle somebody like we did in the third quarter, you should just go out and do it,” Shelley Davis said. “We were just letting them take shots and they were dogging some in. We just did not play aggressively in the first half.”
Sylvan Hills (7-12, 5-3) led 25-14 at halftime and outscored the Lady Cougars (1-12, 0-8) 21-7 in the third quarter. The Lady Bears didn’t give up a point in the fourth.
Sylvan Hills was on the road again on Friday against Monticello. It has two more road games next week that wraps up a seven-game, four-week stretch of road games.
“It does get a little tough,” Shelley Davis said. It’s very rare to have seven conference games in a row on the road. It gets tough for the players because the homework and makeup work starts the pile up. It’ll be good when we finally play at home.”
