MARSEILLES – Scott Horrie and the Gardner-South Wilmington boys basketball team had a first half to forget and a second half to remember Wednesday at the Marseilles Holiday Tournament.
After picking up his third foul, Horrie sat the final 6-and-a-half minutes of a scoreless first half and watched his Panthers fall behind Seneca by nine points at halftime.
His 20 second-half points, however, carried the Panthers to a 52-45 victory over the Fighting Irish in a seventh-place game.
“They had a pretty good defense, and I had two charges in the first half, so I was just trying to avoid that,” Horrie said. “Maybe stop, take a couple 3s – which I did, made it. I was just careful on my drives – just kinda floated it up there, and they went in.”
Although the Irish endured 2-for-17 shooting in the third quarter, the Panthers (8-5) did not really take advantage initially due to their own offensive struggles.
That changed during a whirlwind final minute that featured two 3s and a driving basket from Horrie, along with an Alex Bunna transition basket. Seneca’s eight-point lead had turned into the first G-SW lead of the game at 32-30.
“We asked Scott to kind of take over at that point in time and do some things that are not characteristic of us,” G-SW coach Chris Gibson said. “We kind of ran away from our sets a little bit, and ran a little more of just, ‘Hey, Scott, let’s go out and do something special,’ and he did some special stuff there at the end of that third quarter.”
Devin Bryant’s hook shot 34 seconds into the fourth quarter drew Seneca (3-10) back to match the Panthers, behind five more points from Horrie that were reeled off a 7-0 run.
Back-to-back jumpers by Irish forward Brody Harty later made it a 3-point game, but Horrie, Bunna and Walker Eutsey went a combined 7-for-8 at the line in the final minute for the Panthers.
Seneca finished 12-for-43 from the field and 5-for-23 from 3-point territory.
“We just gotta make shots, and what happened in the third quarter is we missed jumper after jumper after jumper,” Seneca coach Russell Witte said. “Now you get a little bit discouraged, and I thought for about a three-minute stretch, we stopped playing defense. We let the offensive end of the floor dictate what we did on the defensive side of the ball.”
Both coaches deemed it a bittersweet tournament. For Gibson, an opening-round upset of Hall Township and the comeback against Seneca were diminished somewhat by a second-round collapse against Putnam County.
Witte feels that, were it not for a few poor stretches, the Irish easily could have been 3-1 or 2-2 rather than settling for a first-round defeat of St. Benedict.