The Galion boys basketball team recovered from a slow first-half of its opening game against Plymouth but finished with a 55-38 victory.
In the first half of the game, the Tigers were ahead by a point for each quarter including a 19-18 rout by halftime at the Galion High School gymnasium.
“We thought we were a better team going into it,” said Colby Bright, first-year Galion head boys basketball coach. “And we told them, ‘hey you can’t let a team that’s not good as you hang around,’ and we let them hang around.”
“It made me pretty nervous to say the least,” he said.
But in the third quarter, the Tigers increased its lead against the Big Red by 18 points, while the Big Red added 7 points. Galion added an additional 18 points, or 7 points more than Plymouth, in the fourth quarter.
“We figured out a way to win,” Bright said. “We put some stops together and started hitting some shots, and I think that was the difference.”
Senior point guard Houston Blair led the scorers with 13 points including a 3-pointer, while Kalvin Rinehart added 11 points and Colton Moore tallied 9.
“We just had to keep pressure on the guards,” Blair said. “The more pressure we put on them, the more they turned it over, the more we scored.”
“We played really slow to start,” he added. “This always happens to us no matter what we do. “
Galion will play Jonathan Alder on Dec. 3 and Buckeye Valley on Dec. 5 – both in Mid Ohio Athletic Conference action.
“The next two games are going to be especially tough – they’re the top teams in the conference – so we just got to turn it on,” Blair said.
“We cannot be like we were in the first half,” he added. “We got to be like we were the second half the whole game.”
Bright said that team’s offense was too stagnant in the first half, while the team’s defense didn’t box up well.
“I was not impress with them tonight. I thought we would’ve play a lot better than that with eight seniors on the basketball team,” he said. “This week we’ve got to get a lot better if we really want to compete at a high level.”
