By Noah Dalton
Mitchell High School played on back-to-back nights, Friday and Saturday, taking on North Knox at The Hive before traveling to Brownstown-Central 24 hours later to take on the Braves, who are the #2 ranked team at the 2A level in the state, also ranked as the #11 overall in Indiana.
In the first matchup, the Bluejackets started strong against the Warriors, ending the first quarter with an 18-10 lead, which they extended to a 24-point advantage at the half, 43-19. They were led early by Austin Mosier, who hit 5/7 three-point attempts in the half for 15 points.
In the second half, North Knox battled their way back into the game, reducing the lead to 14 points by the end of the third quarter, before a huge fourth quarter that saw them make it a one-possession game as the final buzzer neared.
Mitchell were able to fend off the surging Warriors, thanks to some clutch free throw shooting from guard Aiden Pridemore, who hit both of his final attempts at the line to ice the game, winning 67-65.
“We took our foot off the gas. Hindsight is 2020, probably the third quarter middle I would have stopped pressing on our end, just to slow them down because I think speeding them up allowed them to get some easy looks and easy opportunities, and then their 1-3-1 they threw at us, we settled into shots that we were making in the first half that weren’t going in the second half, so we lost a huge lead,” Bluejackets’ head coach Jackson Ryan said regarding the Warriors’ near comeback.
“But on the flip side of that, we still found a way to win against North Knox and all the momentum in the world. And I still felt like we were calm and under control in crunch time there. Aiden Pridemore stepped up and made two huge free throws, won the game for us. So, from my first year to now, I’m never not going to celebrate a win regardless of the situation, and for us to find a way to get a win and move to 5-2, we always want to celebrate those.”
Mitchell weren’t quite as successful against highly-ranked Brownstown-Central on Saturday, falling 75-36.
The Braves are led by senior Jack Benter, a 6’6″ shooting guard who is committed to play for the Purdue Boilermakers after he’s finished with high school.
Benter, who eclipsed 2,000 career points in the game, scored an efficient 28 points on the night, shooting 12/18 from the floor, with his only miss on the night from inside the arc coming on a botched alley-oop dunk attempt.
In total, Brownstown-Central drained 13 threes against Mitchell, 11 of which they sank in the first half against the Bluejackets’ zone defense.
“We dared them to shoot the ball. We tried to play a 2-3 zone on them and they made us pay and when you’re playing a special team like that, you’ve got to try to take something away,” Ryan said. “Next time around, if given the opportunity somewhere in the state tournament. We’ll give them a different look. One way or the other, but credit to them. They took full advantage of how we were playing them and made us pay for it.”
Ryan credited Brownstown-Central’s basketball program after the game, saying their long-term development efforts have helped them to become one of the state’s top teams.
“The biggest difference tonight was shooting and physicality. This was a program win for them tonight. The weight room and the shooting, the individual skill development that they put into their game, darn near 365 days out of the year. That’s how you build special players and special teams and I think that we’ve come a long way physically, especially in the past year, but it shows that we have more work to do,” he said.
“Tonight’s result is not from a bad game today or from a bad week of practice. This is something that accumulated over a long period of time and if we want to get to that level, it’s what we’ve got to do every day and show up and work and get better to have an opportunity to knock off a team like that.”
