FOXBURG, Pa. (EYT/D9) — Both the A-C Valley and Karns City boys basketball teams are long on youth.
Sophomores dot the teams’ starting lineups.
(Above, Karns City sophomore Taite Beighley eyes up a free throw during the first quarter.)
Both teams lost career scoring leaders from last year, too — the Falcons said goodbye to Levi Orton and the Gremlins bid farewell to Chase Beighley. Those two had 3,400 points between them.
Both teams also had to replace other key players.
That made the matchup between them an intriguing one Monday night.
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Karns City built seven-point lead in the first quarter and closed the door quickly on an A-C Valley glimmer of a comeback attempt in the second half to emerge with a 47-32 victory.
On this night, Karns City’s youth — and defense — won out.
“My hat’s off to Karns City,” said A-C Valley coach Anthony McGarvey. “They’re just way more disciplined for being as young a team as they are. I wish Coach (Zach) Kepple could kind of share with me his magic about how he’s getting these kittens herded correctly.”
Karns City’s defense was able to effectively corral A-C Valley’s bigs — sophomore Jay Clover, junior Landon Chalmers and junior Alex Preston — for the most of the night.
Chalmers ended up with a team-high 10 points with eight coming in the second half. Clover finished with eight, but made only one field goal.
“We came in undersized and that was a concern tonight,” Kepple said. “I thought we did a good job defending them.”
Micah Rupp and Luke Garing did most of the yeoman work inside defending Chalmers, Clover and Preston.
Chalmers and Clover both have had 20-plus point games this season, but were held to less than half that combined.
“I thought Luke Garing played a really good game defensively,” Kepple said. “He controlled Clover. Micah played a good game. He was great defensively. I thought he did really well.”
Rupp, a junior, was also a factor on offense, scoring eight of his game-high 14 points in the second half, mostly by slashing to the hoop.
Sophomore point guard Taite Beighley scored all eight of his points in the first quarter to get Karns City going.
The Gremlins led 17-10 at the end of the first thanks to a quick 5-0 spurt in the final 90 seconds, and led 26-14 at the half.
Karns City’s lead swelled to 34-18 with a little less than three minutes remaining in the third quarter, but A-C Valley cut that advantage to 10 and had possession at the start of the fourth.
That’s as close as the Falcons could get.
Rupp scored on a layup and Cole Sherwin hit a 3-pointer on back-to-back trips down the court for Karns City to put the A-C Valley deficit back to 15 and squash the Falcons’ momentum.
“Our offense was kind of like the weather tonight — cold,” McGarvey said. “No matter what we tried to do, we had two guys doing one thing and three guys doing something else. When all five guys on the floor aren’t clicking, it’s gonna be a long night.”
A-C Valley (4-3) did limit Beighley’s damage after the first quarter with a box-and-one defense.
That’s something Kepple said Karns City is will see a lot of from teams hoping to contain the Gremlins’ budding star.
“That’s hopefully something we can improve on as we go because we’re going to see that again,” Kepple said. “We’ve seen that almost every game so far.”
Karns City (6-1) also didn’t play as aggressively at times as Kepple would have hoped.
“We talked about how we were playing into their game plan,” Kepple said. “We were too timid. That’s definitely a big takeaway from this game and something we have to work on. There’s some good takeaways and some things we have to do better. But I’m never gonna complain about a win.”
Redbank Valley, Keystone, and Union/A-C Valley sports coverage on Explore and D9Sports.com is brought to you by Heeter Lumber.
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