Seneca wins in OT over Coal City, Hall falls in Shipyard Showdown semifinals

SENECA — It will be No.1 facing No. 2 in Saturday’s championship game of the Shipyard Showdown Boys Basketball Tournament hosted by Seneca High School.

In Friday’s semifinals, top-seeded Seneca defeated Coal City in overtime, while No. 2 and defending champion Lexington topped Hall.

The third-place game between the Red Devils and Coalers is slated for a 6 p.m. tipoff with the title game to follow.

Seneca 65, Coal City 61 (OT)

The Fighting Irish (12-2) trailed by 10 with three minutes to play, but fought back and used Paxton Giertz’s 3-pointer from the right wing with two seconds remaining to send the game to overtime.

In the extra session, Giertz’s triple with 56 seconds left, and four free throws helped clinch the win.

Giertz led Seneca with a game-high 27 points, as well as seven rebounds, six assists, three steals and three blocks. Sebastian Deering added 12 points and 13 rebounds, Brayden Zydron eight points and six rebounds, Cameron Shriey seven points and Brady Sheedy five points.

“As much as I loved watching Paxton make that shot at the end of regulation, the play of the game was Brady Sheedy keeping the ball alive off the first miss and tipping the ball to Pax,“ Seneca coach Russ Witte said. ”Brady busted his butt and made a huge play; without his hustle we are playing for third (Saturday). Brady also made a couple of keys shots for us late in the fourth to help keep it a one possession game.

“I’ll be honest, and I told the kids afterwards, we didn’t deserve to win this game. Coal City played free and had a good game plan they executed. We had too many kids that were too tentative, didn’t want to make mistakes, took bad shots and didn’t take the shoots we want them to take. We also broke down way too many times defensively.”

Seneca led 13-11 after one quarter and 25-22 at halftime. But Coal City used a 16-13 third quarter advantage to lead 38-35 heading to the fourth.

Dylan Young had 20 points and four rebounds to lead Coal City (9-3), while Gabe McHugh added 18 points and nine rebounds. Gavin Berger and Dane Noffsinger each had eight points, the former also grabbing seven rebounds.

“You’re right, a tough way to end the game, but hopefully we can grow for it,” Coal City coach Joe Micetich said. “I was really happy with how our guys were able to adapt to a game plan on short notice. We had a couple of different ways we wanted to attack and defend Seneca, and we used both of them pretty effectively. The guys played hard and did everything I asked of them, but Seneca just made a couple of more plays in key situations than we did.

“Any team that plays Seneca is going to try and not let Giertz go crazy and I thought we did that. He was able to hit a couple of big shots down the stretch, but I felt like we made him earn everything he got.”

Lexington 81, Hall 61

The Minutemen (11-2) opened the first four minutes of the game hitting their first six shots, including three from beyond the arc, and led 25-12 after the opening quarter.

“The first four minutes of the game killed us,” Hall coach Mike Filippini said. “All we talked this afternoon about after we found out we were playing Lexington was that we had to have a good start and not get down early. We gave them some open looks to start the game, but they also hit three or four shots with hands in their face. Lexington is a very solid Class 1A team and one that has legitimately six kids that can hit 3-pointers. They can hurt you so many different ways and they did in the first quarter.”

The Red Devils (7-6) were able to cut the disadvantage to 13 (69-56) with just under four minutes to go, but Lexington responded with a 7-2 run to put the game away.

Blaine Friedmansky led Lexington with a game-best 23 points. Micah Coffman, Bo Stutzman and Joe Cheever added 13 points each, with the latter two also recording five rebounds apiece.

Hall was led by 16 points and eight rebounds from Braden Curran. Noah Plym and Chace Sterling chipped in 11 and nine points respectively off the bench.

“Outside of the start, I thought we did a good job of matching them until towards the end,“ Filippini said. ”We were able to keep the game within 12-14 points but could just never seem to get any closer. While I’m disappointed in the outcome, I was pleased with how the guys really battled and played hard. We’ll go home, get a good night sleep, get up and maybe get a short walkthrough in (Saturday morning) and come back over here looking to finish the tournament on a high note.”