ASHLAND – The Ashland boys basketball team spent its previous 11 games entering Tuesday night reconstructing its season.
But painfully unable to overcome a bad first quarter, the Arrows watched a resilient Fremont Ross squad take a wrecking ball to the rebuild in their Division I sectional semifinal, 58-55.
The 16th-seeded Little Giants stunned 14th-seeded Ashland with a 16-4 lead after the opening eight minutes and AHS spent the rest of the night trying to recover.
The Arrows (10-13), who were 7-4 in the second half of their regular season after a 3-8 start, never had a lead.
Ross (6-17), meanwhile, hit 7-of-10 free throws inside the final minute, and when the visitors went 0-for-2 at the stripe with 46 seconds left and clinging to a 51-48 edge, they managed to get the offensive rebound in the skirmish, then hit the next pair of freebies.
Just a few fourth-quarter plays like that helped keep the Little Giants playing from in front on a night when both teams had eight turnovers. Both took the same amount of shots from the field (each attempted 17 3-pointers and 25 2-pointers).
“We’ve got a young group of core guys that played quite a bit and I think they’re going to get better, but we’ve got to get a lot tougher; that was very evident tonight,” said Arrows coach Jason Hess, who started three sophomores for most of the season.
“A couple of plays there really stood out in the fourth quarter that (Ross) made that our guys didn’t make.”
The defeat was somewhat surprising when considering the Little Giants entered Tuesday having lost 10 straight games and hadn’t won on the road since their season-opener.
Ross also had been just 1-16 when scoring fewer than 60 points.
But the squad was also talented enough that its last win came Jan. 16 against Northern Lakes League champion Sylvania Southview (17-5). Head coach John Cahill felt Fremont’s tenacity and tough schedule prepared it for a night like Tuesday.
“I have a ton of respect for our kids in the fact that they never punted (the season) when it would have been easy to,” said Cahill, who formerly coached the Clyde girls program to a pair of Final Four appearances in 20 seasons there.
“This is mostly last year’s JV team with (leading scorer Makai Lee as the returner) and they work, they listen, they keep trying.”
“At the beginning of the year we defended and rebounded like crazy; we haven’t lately,” he added. “I felt like tonight, even though (Ashland) made shots and made plays, we got back to being more of what we need to be right now to be competitive.”
Junior all-conference guards Lee (game-high 19 points) and Dekentre Hardin (18 points) were absolute backbreakers against Ashland. Both hit four 3-pointers and nabbed key offensive rebounds throughout a game that rarely saw AHS get off a second-chance shot.
The Arrows were within either two or three points on four different occasions in the third quarter. But in that same period, Hardin hit a pair of treys and assisted on two more.
That gave Ross the ammunition it needed late to overcome the fact that it was outscored 51-42 by Ashland after the first quarter.
“Makai and Dekentre got good looks tonight and played well off each other,” Cahill said, “and the bigs, I thought, did a nice job of making a couple of really nice passes.”
Fremont hit 53 percent of its 3-point tries (9-of-17), outdoing the Arrows (6-of-17) from the perimeter while forcing them to try to do their scoring in the paint.
That proved to be the right formula, as Ashland went just 1-for-12 from the field in the first quarter while Ross also blocked four shots.
“In that first quarter we just played a little tight, for whatever reason,” Hess said. “Offensively, we had some chances, I thought we had some looks and we had multiple guys miss shots in close that are (usually) shots they make.
“We dug ourselves such a big hole there in the first that we were just kind of chasing it after that.”
Arrows sophomore guard Paxon Ediger broke through in the second quarter to score nine of his team-high 18 points in a little over two minutes.
But the Little Giants kept coming up with answers, as 6-foot-6 junior Michael Stover went toe-to-toe with AHS 6-foot-5 sophomore Nathan Bernhard down low, and Lee had 13 points at halftime.
Outside of Ediger, Ashland’s starters were limited to just two total field goals in the entire first half.
Bernhard finished with 16 points – half of them coming at the free-throw line, where the Arrows were 13-for-16 – and sophomore guard Gabe Baith scored all eight of his points in the fourth.
“We were playing with pretty good energy and I thought the guys on the bench were definitely into the game,” Hess said. We were hoping and begging for some of those shots to go in and they just didn’t fall.”
For Ross, the victory snapped a four-game losing streak against Ashland in the postseason dating back to 2001. It also broke a five-game home winning streak the Arrows had put together after losing their first six at home this season.
The Little Giants now get a sectional title game Friday night at sixth-seeded Toledo St. John’s. The Titans (14-8) had a first-round bye after winning five of their last seven to close the regular season.
“To come here, with their student section and the way Ashland supports their teams, to get out to that (16-4) lead was really big,” Cahill said. “And we needed it all, because we barely held on.”
The game was the last for the Arrows senior trio of Isaac Stewart, Max Swaisgood and Keith Bowman. Stewart hit the game’s final shot while Swaisgood’s 3-pointer was Ashland’s only field goal in the first quarter.
“I’m super proud of that group of three (seniors),” Hess said. “Just for their commitment for the last six years and to be able to stick with us and be leaders on this team and be great teammates.
“They didn’t necessarily play as many minutes as some of the other guys, but they were our best teammates.”
“We definitely learned a lot this year and saw improvement,” he added. “It would have been nice to be able to get one more signature win, but I do think our guys are ready to get better for next year.”
