ADVERTISEMENT

Riverheads Rolls Over Waynesboro

longtimerhsfan

VaPreps All Region
Dec 12, 2006
5,385
1,475
113
The good news is that the Gladiators led from wire to wire tonight and evened their season record at 2-2 with a solid 64-46 road win over the Waynesboro Little Giants. The bad news is that I will not be able to provide that many details because the streaming of the game was the worst of any I have tried to watch this season. The clock never worked at all, and the screen froze so many times that I missed at least one-third of the scoring. But I have since learned from a local paper that the guard tandem of Ryan Farris and Adam Painter led the way with a combined 45 points. They connected on five three-pointers and Farris' 23 points was a career high. D'ante Gray continued to add some quality production with 9 points.

As for the keys to the game, coaches will tell you that it is important to either start strong or finish strong and in this case, the Gladiators did both. They scored the first eight points of the game and stretched that early lead out to 14-3 as Waynesboro had trouble getting untracked. The lead then stayed in the 6-10 point range for much of the contest until the Giants made one final push early in the fourth and closed to within 48-44. That is when the Gladiators stepped on the gas a final time and closed out the game on a final 16-2 run.

However, the third quarter featured two key stretches that definitely contributed to the win. The Big Red had taken a 33-25 lead into the locker room and when they came out, Farris hit a jumper in the lane, and Painter then immediately stole the inbounds pass and laid it in to give the visitors four of the quickest points you will ever see in a game. As it turned out those were needed because Waynesboro, which was led tonight by a 21-point effort from Vinny Sipe, scored the next eight and suddenly the Riverheads lead was down to 37-33.

The teams then traded buckets for the rest of the quarter until Painter hit a corner three just before the horn that bounced high in the air and then circled around the rim before dropping in to give the Gladiators a 48-39 lead heading into the fourth. If that shot had not fallen, the five-point spurt that Waynesboro had to open the final stanza would have trimmed that lead to a single digit at 45-44, and who knows what might have happened if the Giants had gotten that close.

Riverheads will host Stuarts Draft Tuesday night and hopefully can build on tonight's win. The Cougars, who no longer practice their love-it-or-hate-it "3diculous" style of play, opened with a victory over Wilson but have now dropped three in a row so they will likely come into the Coliseum hungry to get back on the winning track.

Let's hope for a decent game that night and even more importantly a decent streaming of it for those fans who cannot attend in person. Since the quality of the streaming is looking like it will be an ongoing problem, I hope some administrators or coaches are letting the NFHS know that it is not working quite as well as we would like. As I had mentioned in my post last night, the game out at Buffalo Gap streamed very nicely, so I was encouraged by that, which made tonight's step backwards somewhat disappointing.

There was no JV game tonight but depending on how you feel about a certain other team, the evening got a lot more entertaining when the Virginia Cavaliers destroyed Clemson 85-50 in a much touted match-up featuring a pair of Top 20 teams. Even better, Louisville lost later in the evening, which leaves the Cavaliers as the only team still unbeaten in ACC play.
 
If you have any “Political Pull” see if Coach Coffey be willing to play PM @ Riverheads Wednesday...We NEED a game! BAD
 
I wish I did. But Riverheads already has games this week on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, so I am sure the Big Red cannot help you out.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mike777VSP
ADVERTISEMENT