MUSKEGON TOWNSHIP – Coach Rodney Walker remembers the not-so-distant past, when his Muskegon girls basketball team won conference titles in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
He also has fond memories of the 2019-20 season, when he moved over to coach Reeths-Puffer and his Rockets won a league championship.
Last season was a rebuilding year at R-P, and Walker’s squad finished lower in the pack in the O-K Green, while Mona Shores won the title and Muskegon finished second.
But now Walker’s squad is back in familiar territory, batting Mona Shores and Muskegon for first place as the season winds down.
The Rockets kept themselves in the conference title race by pulling off a surprisingly easy 42-32 victory over Mona Shores on Tuesday in a key O-K Green conference showdown, avenging a 21-point loss to the Sailors earlier in the season.
[1]The outcome left Muskegon alone in first place with a 10-1 conference mark, while Reeths-Puffer and Mona Shores are now tied for second at 9-2.
Mona Shores will play Muskegon on Friday, while Reeths-Puffer will meet up with the Big Reds on Feb. 22.
The race will clearly go down to the wire, but after their big win on Tuesday, Reeths-Puffer is fired up about the possibility of jumping all the way from fifth place to first in one season.
“We know that right now we have to take care of business each game,” said Walker, whose team is now 11-5 overall on the season. “If we win out, we could end up in a tie for the conference championship.
“It’s good for the conference. You don’t want to see just one team standing out on top of everybody. You want it to be more balanced with everyone having a chance, and I said early on that any team in this league has a chance to beat anyone on any night. It’s a very balanced and competitive conference this season.”
The game was not pretty by any means, with both teams missing shots and turning the ball over a lot. But Mona Shores had the bigger problems in the first half, hitting only 7 of 23 shots from the floor with 12 turnovers,
That allowed Reeths-Puffer to grab a 19-16 lead after one quarter and a 26-23 lead at halftime.
The Sailors started showing some life in the third quarter, opening the second half with a 5-0 run on a layup by Jenna Tierman and a 3-pointer from Olivia Sobczak to take a 21-19 lead.
But the Rockets ended the low-scoring quarter with an 8-2 run, fueled by buckets from Brooklyn Tornes, Arronna Williams and Sophia Hekkema to take a 26-23 lead into the fourth.
[2]Mona Shores had the first basket of the final quarter, then R-P answered with a driving layup by Williams, a rebound and layup by Irie Niklasch and two free throws by Ariel Walker to open up a 32-27 lead.
The Sailors pulled within three points with 3:06 remaining, but then the Rockets slowed down their offense to kill the clock, forcing the Sailors to foul and rush their offense a bit when they got the ball.
Walker hit a pair of breakaway layups in transition with 1:39 and 50 seconds remaining, putting the Rockets up by seven. Khaleeya Cook made two free throws for Mona Shores with 43 seconds left to make the score 36-31, but Hekkema went to the line twice for R-P and hit all four free throws, and Williams clinched the 10-point win with a layup with three seconds remaining.
“I just thought we did a good job defensively of sticking to our script,” Coach Walker said. “If they were going to beat us tonight, they were going to have to do it from three-point range. We wanted to take away the lanes and make them beat us from the outside, and I think we did a good job of that.
“I also think we did a good job of slowing down our offense a little in the second half. In the first half we were rushing a bit, but in the second we controlled the tempo, which we wanted to do.”
Walker finished with a game-high 15 points, Williams added 10 and Hekkema had nine for the Rockets.
Tierman led Mona Shores with 12 points while Sobczak and Cook each scored six.
While the Rockets celebrated their big victory, Mona Shores coach Mike Phillips was remembering a similar scenario last season, when his team beat Reeths-Puffer easily at home, then lost later on the Rockets’ home court on another cold shooting night.
[3]Of course his team went on to win the conference title, and Phillips is hoping that will turn out to be the case again.
“We just didn’t make the shots,” said Phillips, whose team lost for the first time in six games and is 14-3 overall on the season. “We had some open looks, but when you’re not hitting shots against the zone it becomes a little more difficult. When you’re not making shots inside or outside it’s tough to get a momentum shift.
“I think Puffer did a good job of stopping our transition offense. We came out after halftime and got a few of those baskets and some momentum, but then it just kind of stalled out.”