Plainfield South toughens up to topple Romeoville

PLAINFIELD – There weren’t a whole lot of style points awarded during the first three quarters of Friday night’s Southwest Prairie Conference battle between Plainfield South and Romeoville.

But the host Cougars didn’t seem too concerned with that, and after surviving those rugged first three quarters they flicked the offensive switch and ran away for a 62-42 victory.

“This was our third game this week. We started out with Bolingbrook there and then we had a tough Morris game, I mean, my goodness,” Plainfield South coach Jeff Howard said. “Those two games prepared us to play tonight. It was a good win for us.”

Neither team could gather much of a foothold in the game early on as points were at a premium. The Cougars (16-7, 8-4) went on a 10-1 run at the end of the second quarter, which constituted as a huge scoring flurry in this one, and led at the break 20-14.

Plainfield South continued to keep Romeoville at arm’s length throughout the third quarter, although the Spartans did close to within two points at one point.

But the Spartans (12-13, 7-5) were never able to get over the hump as it seemed each time Romeoville was on the verge of doing so, a different Plainfield South player would step up and deliver.

The Cougars used primarily an iron-man lineup with five players logging almost all off the game’s minutes.

Corey Nobles (10 points) and Kareem Parker (14 points) kept Plainfield South firmly in control of the scoreboard in the third quarter, and Jeremiah Huerta (14 points) made sure the Cougars finished things off with a 10-point fourth quarter.

Joel Tunnat (11 points) and Brilan Townsend (nine points) rounded out Plainfield South’s iron-man group, all of which seemed to fill their roles exactly as expected.

“We knew what we were coming into,” Nobles said. “We knew it was going to be a physical game and we came right back and punched them in the mouth.”

Romeoville inched back into the game early in the fourth quarter with a couple of baskets from Danny Thompson as the Spartans closed to within 38-32.

But that only seemed to spurn the Cougars forward as they rattled off the game’s next seven points in less than a minute to build the lead to double digits, and Romeoville would not remotely threaten in the game again.

The Spartans got a game-high 19 points from Damion Porter Jr., but Romeoville was never able to get much going offensively and got virtually no offense from a transition game it typically leans on for points.

“The thing that I put on the board in there is that we would have to play through contact,” Howard said. “Romeoville is very physical and in the past that’s where we fell apart. We couldn’t handle the physicality, so we’ve geared our practices around that in mind.”