Charger Boys Victims of "Lid on the Basket"

Every now and then a less than stellar shooting performance is blamed on the notion that "There was a lid on the basket." That certainly seem to be the case for the ACGC boys' basketball team last night when it made just one of twelve shot attempts in the second quarter of its WCAC game with Van Meter. The Chargers never recovered from the chilly shooting performance and suffered a 67-43 home loss at the hands of the Bulldogs.

Trailing 20-14 after the first frame, the Chargers scored just a single free throw in the second stanza and trailed by a 36-17 score at the intermission.

"We had too many unforced errors early that led to easy transition buckets for Van Meter, and then our offense went missing in the second quarter," Charger coach Lance Kading said following the loss.

"I feel like we settled down and played better in the second half, but even then it was far from our best performance. We made a couple of runs in the second half, but couldn't get enough stops on defense to maintain momentum."

The Chargers never got closer than sixteen points after the halftime break at 42-26 and 45-29 midway through the third quarter, the latter coming after a three pointer by Ben Marsh. But another drought followed with ACGC scoring only a single free throw by Charlie Crawford over the last four and a half minutes of the quarter. The Chargers found themselves trailing by a 51-30 margin heading into the final eight minutes,

The teams' respective shooting percentages reflect what happened on the court, with Van Meter shooting 60% on 25 makes out of 42 attempts, while the Chargers connected on just 15 of 53 tries for 28%. Another revealing stat is the number of points each team scored "in the paint", i.e. in the lane. Van Meter outscored ACGC 34-12 in the lane area.

Lucas Marsh was the only Charger in double figures with 12 points and also led in rebounds with 5. Miles Kading and Brock Littler each netted 7 points. Eli and Miles Kading had 5 and 4 assists respectively, while the brother duo each had 2 steals.

The loss drops the Chargers' overall record to 11-4 and 7-4 in the WCAC.

Score by quarter:

VM 20 16 15 16--67

ACGC 14 3 13 13--43

Charger individual statistics (TP-REB-ASSTS-STLS): EKading (6-1-5-2) BMarsh (2-3-0-0) Crawford (3-5-0-0) LMarsh (12-5-1-0) MKading (7-0-4-2) Wardyn (6-1-1-0) Rogers (0-0-0-0)

Littler (7-1-1-1) Kunkle (0-0-0-0) Richter (0-1-0-0) Weinkoetz (0-2-0-0)