The Dulaney Lions marched into River Hill and kept its unbeaten record in tact with a 68-57 win.
However, this was far from your typical shootout controlled by the team with the superior record. Both coaches went toe to toe in attempting to expose flaws in the other’s diligently constructed plans.
“The object was to see if they could adjust, not knowing what we were gonna run,” Dulaney coach James Dickey said. “The game plan was to throw a curveball there.”
He and River Hill’s Matt Graves engaged in a classic chess match, spending all game deploying updated adjustments as each side attempted to counteract the other’s most recent strategy. The constant one-upmanship leaned toward the visiting Lions, who seized an immediate lead they’d never relinquish.
That tactical warfare gets a lot easier when you’re armed with Kelan Dennis, a three-level threat who scored 27 to add to his explosive start to the season. He, at one point, single handedly necessitated a schematic shift, with the Hawks unable to contain the big guard in what would eventually be their undoing.
“When one kid is probably gonna score 30 or 40 on you, you make an adjustment very quickly,” Graves said. “We didn’t want him to keep lighting us up. I felt like not even one guy could have stopped him.”
He wasted no time showing the Clarksville crowd what he was capable of, ripping two triples in Dulaney’s first few trips up the court.
On the other end of the floor, Dickey enforced his shapeshifting defense with a 3-2 zone that morphed into a 2-3 formation after the first few possessions, ruffling the Hawks’ feathers and forcing misses from the kind of jump shots they’d made all season to this point.
“They did a good job of stretching us out and making us rush a little bit, but we had to hit some shots,” Graves said. “We have some good shooters, just couldn’t make them when we needed to.”
They felt that deficit nearly immediately, stumbling into a 9-0 hole after the first few minutes, and found that Dulaney defense fairly impenetrable throughout the first half. The Lions entered the break up 32-21, riding Dennis and their assortment of stoppers into an early lead.
But just like the Lions had all season, their mighty lead quickly shriveled up early in the second half after River Hill made its move. The Hawks picked up the pace themselves, forcing the defense out of position and zipping passes all around the court until the ball found the shooter or cutter.
“We like to speed other teams up; it’s not often other teams want to speed us up,” Dickey said.
River Hill made a pronounced effort to take Dennis out of the game. He scored 14 by halftime, but Graves hit him with a box-and-one defense, ordering his Hawks to act as a standard four-man zone defense while assigning one specific defender to take the star out of the game with pressing defense.
No matter for Dennis, who trusted his teammates enough to let them handle the game without him as an active member of the offense.
“Honestly, I was happy,” he said, “because then my guys could work. Four vs. four, I’ll take my guys, for sure.”
They survived his temporary lack of scoring, but only barely; the Hawks clawed back to make it a one-possession game, necessitating Dulaney to reinforce their interior defense — and then get some scoring help from Dennis. He successfully forced his way back into the ballgame, slithering around screens to operate in the midrange to hurt River Hill at the heart of their own zone formation.
The Lions held on for the victory, with Dickey having to remind his high schoolers of the fundamentals down the stretch. They limited their fouling, cut down on forced 3-pointers and locked in on defense, pressing high enough to disrupt the Hawks at midcourt several times to separate in the final minutes.
“We’re playing the winning game,” the coach said, referring back to those habits he’s constantly reinforcing. “We’re playing for something bigger than ourselves. As long as we keep installing that in our kids, we’ll be just fine.”
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