Red Raiders storm past Brownsville
BROWNSVILLE – Look out Class AAA, here come the Red Raiders. Uniontown used a strong transition game to an easy 90-58 win over Brownsville in the Section 3-AAA opener for both teams last night at Brownsville.
Junior Mays and Kelvin Brown paced Uniontown’s balanced scoring attack with 22 points each, while Brandon Duncan added 13 and Reese Hodge 12, as the Red Raiders improved to 4-1 overall. Brownsville fell to 1-4, despite 15 points from Carson Thomas and 12 more from Paul Hlatky.
It was Uniontown’s first game in Class AAA since the inception of Class AAAA. The Red Raiders won the WPIAL Class AAAA title last year before dropping down for this season.
“I knew they’d be tough coming in,” Brownsville coach Pete Logan said. “We just couldn’t match up with their athletes. They were a small Quad-A school, but they are big in Triple-A. They just have too many kids. Their team is so deep with athletes.”
Perhaps the most athletic of all the athletes is Brown, a sleek 6-1 junior forward. He went through Brownsville’s defense like a hot knife through butter.
“He has more athletic ability than anybody on the team,” Kezmarsky said. “Tonight, he was the difference and this is only his fifth varsity game.”
And those athletes were off and running and the first sign of a missed Brownsville shot or errant pass. The Red Raiders eased their way to a 26-18 lead through one quarter, then turned on the afterburners in the second.
Uniontown opened the second quarter with a 12-0 run and turned it into a 19-3 spurt and a 45-21 game with just under four minutes remaining in the quarter.
“We established the fastbreak,” Uniontown coach Rob Kezmarsky said. “We haven’t been doing that as much as we’d like. We want to move the ball down the floor and score.”
“We concentrated too much on their three-point shooters and they beat us underneath,” Logan said. “Then, we missed some lay-ups and that got them into their transition game.”
Brownsville closed to within 19 points at the half, 49-30, but a 16-6 Uniontown run made it 68-36 with about two minutes left in the third and it was all over.
“They were really keeping us from getting good three-point looks, so we just took it inside,” Mays said. “Then, later in the game, they were concentrating on taking charges, so we were getting better looks from three-point range.”
Indeed, Uniontown hit three of its six three-pointers in the second half.
“When you have good shooters, like Brandon and Junior, we wanted to try to get our inside game working,” Kezmarsky said. “We have some size and we have to take advantage of it. Todd Jackson did a good job of getting the ball to our scorers tonight.”
“We knew they’d be the team to beat in the section,” Logan said. “But three teams go to the playoffs. We’ve got to get better in all phases if we want to go.”
Even after such a tough section-opening loss, Logan believes having Uniontown in the section could be a very, very good thing.
“This is what we’ll see in the playoffs, teams like Uniontown,” he said.
“They will make our section a lot more legitimate. Usually, if you finish third in this section, you’re the bottom seed in the playoffs. But with Uniontown here, plus playing some tough exhibitions, that might not be the case anymore.”
Still, if Uniontown plays as well as it did at Brownsville, this could be a long season for all other Section 3-AAA teams.
“I don’t mean this to brag or anything, but we can play better on offense than we did tonight,” Kezmarsky said.
Now, that’s scary.