Wayne junior Lawrent Rice scored a game-high 25 points, surpassing 1,000 points for his career, as the Warriors improved to 16-7 overall. Wayne sophomore Juan Cranford, Jr. scored 15 points and senior Mike Cole added 11 for the Warriors.
The Wildcats trailed 9-0 to start the game and were never able to recover. They cut the lead to six points multiple times in the second half, but couldn’t get any closer.
“That’s kind of been something like how we’ve been all year,” said Springfield coach Shawn McCullough. “We’ll play hard in spurts and just not play hard all the time. That’s the key to success for us, especially here at Springfield. We’ve got to play hard all the time. We get down and we have to fight and claw back. Lesson learned.”
Barnes scored 14 of his 21 points in the first half, driving to the basket for layups.
“(Barnes and Scott) do a good job of getting to the basket,” McCullough said. “I’m not a big fan of guys settling for jump shots, unless you’re going to get going and work inside out. (Barnes and Scott) do a good job of doing what I’m asking them to do and that’s getting to the rim and finishing.”
In the second half, the Warriors switched to a 2-3 zone to keep Springfield from getting to the lane and force them to take jump shots. They held the Wildcats to just one 3-pointer in the second half.
“At the end of the day, the dribble penetration was hurting us so we wanted to go ahead and stop that and see if guys can make shots,” said Warriors coach Nathan Martindale. “(Springfield’s Micha’ Johnson) fouling out gave us more of an advantage because we knew they had one less shooter. To be honest, if I felt like we could stop the dribble drive, I wouldn’t have played zone, but we just couldn’t tonight. We had to make the adjustments and I felt like those adjustments really helped us.”
The Wildcats utilized a 2-3 zone against the Warriors in their 59-51 victory on Feb. 12, but weren’t able to cause similar problems in the postseason.
“Everything kind of rolled to our advantage (the last game),” McCullough said. “Tonight it wasn’t like that and that’s what happened. Good things happened the whole time we played them and this time, not so much.”
The Wildcats didn’t go down without a fight. They cut the lead to six points at 52-46 on a bucket by senior Eddie Muhammad with about five minutes remaining, but couldn’t get any closer.
The second-seeded Warriors advanced to face third-seeded Franklin in a D-I, Dayton 2 district semifinal at 7:15 p.m. Friday at Centerville.
Springfield will graduate six seniors, but return several varsity players, including Barnes and Scott.
“We’ve got a nice group coming back,” McCullough said. “We’ll be back and we’ll be ready to roll. We’ll be back in the gym in March.”
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