CHESAPEAKE CITY — Bo Manor’s Landon Horsey, Ayden Holderer and Doug Sample combined for 76 points, outscoring Kent County as a team in a Class IA East Region I semifinal here on March 4.
Horsey led all scorers with 36 points, including 20 in the first half to give the No. 2 seed a lead it held the rest of the way en route to an 85-74 victory.
The 85 points represented a season high for the 10-11 Eagles.
Six-foot-three sophomore combo guard Dwan Harris with 25 points was the high scorer for No. 3-seeded Kent County.
JySir Valentine contributed 21 points and Jonah Somerville added eight.
Valentine and Somerville are the only seniors on a squad that lost six of its last seven games to finish 7-14, matching last year’s record.
Also for KCHS, Elijah Wilson and Tyrie Wright scored six and five points, respectively. Gavin Miller, Kiyan Hynson and jayvee call-up Dylan Hurtt made up the balance.
The Trojans opened the game on a 7-1 run, but their lead was short-lived.
Horsey and Sample (18 points) collectively scored nine of the next 11 points as Bo Manor surged ahead, 10-9, on Sample’s four-point play.
The spread at the end of the first quarter was 22-19 and, after opening the second quarter on a 12-4 run, 46-36 at intermission.
The Eagles led by at least eight points throughout the second half, and as many as 19 early in the final frame.
“The difference in the game was Bo Manor was prepared for our aggressiveness. They never panicked,” Sobaye Scott, wrapping up his 13th year as head coach at alma mater KCHS, told The Evening Enterprise in a telephone interview Sunday, March 16.
Scott said Bo Manor was fundamentally sound and “set the tone.”
While the Eagles primarily played a 3-2 zone defense, they occasionally pivoted to a 1-2-1-1 press “to slow us down so we couldn’t get the ball up the court quickly and get set in our offense,” Scott said.
A 7-14 campaign is not what coach Scott predicted when the season tipped off in early December.
“We should have won six or seven more games,” he said in Sunday’s telephone interview.
“Sometimes it was because of confidence,” he continued. “As far as skill, we were skilled enough to play with just about anybody except [state champion] Cambridge.”
NOTES: Six-foot-six JySir Valentine, who scored 369 points in his senior season, finished with a career total of 1,362.
He eclipsed the 1,000-point milestone with 12 points in the 52-51 upset of Class 2A Easton on Jan. 14. Valentine came into the game needing just seven points to reach his 1,000th point, which he scored on a layup with 3:35 remaining in the first half.
Valentine is the first Trojan to join the 1,000-point club since JayShaun Freeman (Class of 2020), who totaled 1,570 points.
Freeman was a two-time team MVP and All-North Bayside Conference performer, and the 2018-19 Player of the Year in the North division of the Bayside Conference.
After a junior college All-America career at Chesapeake College, Freeman has been a starter in each of the last two seasons for NCAA Division II Frostburg State University.
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Top seed Colonel Richardson (17-6) defeated Bo Manor in the 1A East Region I championship game, 89-65. Sophomore Ja’Zir Dickerson scored 43 points for the winners.
Dickerson scored 20 of his game-high 32 points in the second half in a 64-61 victory over Perryville in the semifinal round.
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At the conclusion of the eight region tournaments, the winners were re-seeded for the state 1A quarterfinals.
Liberty (19-5) eliminated Colonel Richardson, 76-47.
In the semis on March 11, top-seeded Cambridge scored with 7.3 seconds remaining to edge Liberty, 65-63.
In another edge-of-your seat classic, Cambridge (25-1) defeated No. 6 seed The Seed School of Baltimore, 36-33 in overtime, for the state title Friday, March 14 at the University of Maryland’s Xfinity Center.
The Vikings scored the final six points.
Koby Ennals’ 3-pointer tied the game at 33 with 37 seconds remaining in regulation.
Sterling Perkins Jr. won the game with an “and one” with 0.4 seconds to go in the five-minute extra period, the only points in OT.