Wildcats settle down to beat AG
YORK RUN – The script couldn’t have begun any better for the Albert Gallatin boys basketball team on Friday night. The Colonials jumped out to a 7-0 lead on visiting Latrobe. Two of the Wildcats’ top players were saddled with foul trouble and a frenzied home crowd was cheering on AG.
But, alas, there was no happy ending in sight for the Colonials as they dropped an 84-69 Section 1-AAAA contest to the Wildcats.
“We were on an opponents floor, we had kids in foul trouble and we weren’t scoring, so things didn’t look good,” Latrobe coach Brad Wetzel said.
That’s when Wetzel called a timeout to try and settle his team.
“I just wanted to calm them down,” Wetzel said. “I told them ‘understand that we have a whole basketball game to play and we aren’t going to lose it in the first three minutes.'”
Instead, the Wildcats won the next five minutes with a 26-7 run that put them up 26-14 after one quarter.
Junior Chris Dudzenski scored 14 of his game-high 28 points in the first quarter as he took over the game for a while.
“I thought Chris really stepped up when we needed him to,” Wetzel said. “We had two other top players in foul trouble and we needed someone to help us out. Chris really answered the bell tonight.”
Meanwhile, the Colonials (2-2, 0-1) went cold from the field and had a hard time stopping a suddenly hot-shooting Latrobe team.
“Basketball is all about runs,” Albert Gallatin coach Warare Gladman said. “I knew they were going to make a run and we just didn’t respond.”
In fact, the Wildcats (3-1, 1-0) pushed their lead as high as 23 points at the end of the third quarter.
That’s when the Colonials made their run.
AG cut the lead to nine points at 68-59 on a pair of free throws by Alex Santella with 5:18 left in the game. However, that was as close as the Colonials would get as the Wildcats played tough defense and hit some key baskets to pick up the victory.
Dudzenski added 14 rebounds; three blocks and three assists in the contest, while Zach Landers and Doug Johnson each scored 13 points. Josh Shoemaker added 12 points off the bench.
“That’s a gritty, gritty basketball team,” Gladman said of Latrobe. “I told the guys that we had to match their intensity and hustle and then double it. We matched their intensity and hustle, but we just couldn’t get that extra push that we needed.”
Jarrett Dotson led the Colonials with 19 points and five rebounds while Jeremiah Desko scored 18 points with eight rebounds.