A three-peat of boys basketball games put the Plant City High School basketball court to good use Tuesday evening.
Plant City is hosting the 2019 Class 8A-District 9 tournament this week and all three area teams got in on the action in the quarterfinal round. All entered with high hopes but only two — Durant and Plant City — made it to the upcoming semifinal round.
Durant kicked things off with a thriller against Lennard, a 67-65 win that saw both teams essentially go basket for basket. The Cougars took a 31-30 lead into the locker room at halftime and finished the third with a 49-47 lead, but a 7-0 run by the Longhorns to start the fourth quarter clearly meant the Cougars needed to find some kind of spark to get and stay ahead.
Jeff White and Yamil Flores came through in the clutch, scoring 16 of Durant’s 18 points in the final quarter and playing hard enough to be the spark the team needed to get fired up. Lennard did get the ball back with 6.5 seconds to go, down by two, but a buzzer beater attempt missed the mark and the Cougars survived one of their toughest grinds of the season.
Strawberry Crest took on an East Bay team that came to play hard. The Indians started with an 11-0 run and remained in control for all of the first half, taking 16-11 and 31-25 leads into the quarters’ ends and looking totally unlike a team that had only won five games all season. The Chargers were able to battle back and take a 38-37 lead with 3:27 left in the third quarter, with Charles Crews scoring the team’s first go-ahead points on a layup, and Crest ended the third quarter with a 46-41 lead with Coneliss Giovenco’s buzzer beater tip-in.
The fourth quarter was full of lead changes and heroic efforts from both teams, but a 57-57 tie went unbroken at the quarter’s end when Jalen Brown’s last-second layup attempt was batted away. Overtime had all of the efforts of the fourth quarter with almost none of the finesse, but the Chargers were nearly able to come back. Down 62-59 with 2:17 to go, Brown was able to swipe the ball out of East Bay’s possession and float a smooth pass to Crews for an easy transition bucket and a 62-61 score. The Chargers were able to hold the ball for the last 17 seconds after a timeout, but Crews’ last-second shot attempt was in vain and the Indians lived to fight another day.
Plant City did manage to break the day’s streak of visiting teams winning, blowing out the Bloomingdale Bulls with a 46-19 score. The Raiders shut the Bulls out in the first half, with Justyn King and Jordyn Manning each scoring six points for the 12-0 lead, and a more balanced attack led by Mykel Oyola in the second quarter helped them go to the locker room with a 22-7 lead at the half.
The hosting team kept pouring on the offense for the next two quarters and, with the starters resting in the fourth, held Bloomingdale to two points in the fourth.