ASHLAND — For the second time in less than a week, chaos reigned supreme in the Ohio Cardinal Conference.
Ashland’s Keslar Bates hit a pair of free throws with less than a second on the clock, lifting the Arrows to a hard-earned — albeit controversial — 67-65 win over short-handed Mount Vernon on Friday at Arrow Arena.
The Arrows (8-3, 4-2) rebounded from Tuesday’s lopsided loss at Mansfield Senior and sent the Yellow Jackets (5-6, 3-2) to their fourth consecutive defeat.
Both Ashland and Mount Vernon trail conference-leading Lexington by one game in the loss column. The Minutemen beat West Holmes 57-51 Friday, meaning the top four teams in the conference are separated by one game in the loss column. Meanwhile, Wooster, which was winless in the OCC prior to this week, followed Tuesday’s upset of Lex with a convincing 68-43 win over Madison.
“People always say, ‘Top to bottom the league is tough,’ ” Mount Vernon coach Nick Coon said. “When you say top to bottom, what is that? I don’t know what that is in our league this year.
“We’ve won some (OCC) games this year by a couple points here and there and the couple we’ve lost, we’ve lost by a couple possessions here or there.
“It’s a stressful league, I know that.”
The stress was palpable Friday night.
Luke Denbow, Ashland’s newly-minted career scoring king, triggered the game-winning sequence with the score tied 65-65 and less than 10 seconds remaining. Denbow, who already had scored 35 points, drew an immediate double team and found fellow senior Jack Swaisgood for a potential game-winning 3-pointer.
Swaisgood’s attempt was off the mark, however, and in the ensuing scrum Bates and Mount Vernon’s Caden Rowland got tangled up while battling for the rebound. One official blew his whistle as the clock expired and, after conferring briefly with the other two members of the crew, ruled Bates had been fouled with four-tenths of a second remaining.
After a Mount Vernon timeout, Bates calmly stepped to the free throw line and sank both ends of the one-and-one to secure the victory.
“By far they were the biggest free throws of my career,” Bates said. “I knew I had to trust my preparation. We shoot free throws all the time. I knew I could make them.”
Bates scored just three points all night. He split a pair of free throws in the first quarter.
“The funny thing is Keslar is one of our better free throw shooters … but his percentage in games has not been that high,” Ashland coach Jason Hess said. “We had that timeout and we just told him, ‘You’re going to make two.’ I don’t think he hit the rim on either one of them. He was pretty cold-blooded.”
The Yellow Jackets played without Beau Bridges. The 6-foot-5 senior forward suffered a high ankle sprain earlier in the week.
“Our kids battled and fought like crazy, (being) a man down. One of our core values is make no excuses. I’m sure we could find some tonight, but we’re not going to,” Coon said. “Credit Ashland. They made enough plays to win the game by two, but I don’t think that discredits what our kids were able to do tonight.”
Nolan Belcher led Mount Vernon with 22 points. Trevor Buttke added 20 and Rowland had 13.
For Ashland, Grayson Steury backed Denbow with 13 points. Swaisgood and Luke Jurjevic added six points apiece.
