The Aplington-Parkersburg basketball teams each defeated East Marshall Monday, as aired on 99 The Wave and RadioOnTheGo’s YouTube channel. The girls won 82-23 and the #9 (2A) boys won 75-68.
In a back-and-forth boys game, the Falcons prevailed with some strong performances in clutch time. The teams battled through numerous lead changes and no lead was ever greater than 10. AP knocked down free throws late, and some clutch buckets by senior Benny Waller helped put the game away in the end. Scoring 37 points, Waller joined the program’s 1,000-career points club. He says it was a great team effort.
“We knew it would be an absolute track meet,” Waller says. “We love to push it, and honestly, they love to push it more than us. So we just knew we’d need to get some stops. Ultimately, down the road, fourth quarter, we put together some stops, made some free throws, huge offensive rebound there by, I think it was Tyler, to extend the possession. And you get two points off of that, and they don’t get a possession. So that’s huge. Honestly, all this is just a testament to how much we trust each other. I had it going tonight and my teammates found me, but it could have been anyone really. And that’s just good when anyone can go off, and everyone trusts each other, no one’s selfish. They find the hot hand and it’s awesome to have on the team.”
Charlie Wessels added 14 points.
In the girls game, the Falcons hung 53 points in the first half and played the second half with the running clock rule in effect. Holding the Mustangs to four points in the second half, they increased their win streak to five.
“The last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about putting four solid quarters together,” senior Kolbie Wangsness says. “So that was another big goal for tonight, and making sure we could execute on offense if we didn’t have anything in transition. That was something we really wanted to focus on, because in games later on, we want to be able to score on offense, and if we don’t have any transition points we needed to focus on that. So I think we did a good job doing that tonight and executing on offense even when we didn’t have transition layups or stuff like that.”
Showing great balance as a team, Wangsness led with 20 points, Ava Eddy scored 19, Lorna Bernard had 18 and Eva Walker added 13.
They’ll return to action Tuesday by hosting Webster City at 6:15 p.m.
