In their final home game of the season, the Wimberley Texans were able to bounce back from their loss to Boerne to blowout the Canyon Lake Hawks on senior night in an emphatic 83-39 win.
With the win and a Bandera loss to Boerne on Friday as well, Wimberley has captured district runner-up without the help of a tiebreaker and will advance to the playoffs as the two seed in District 28.
For Head Basketball coach Mark Whitten, this victory was about bouncing back from the loss against Boerne which eliminated the Texans from forcing a tiebreak for the district championship.
“I think they did a great job of getting back to how we want to play,” Whitten said. “That was due to Canyon Lake being down a little due to having some guys hurt… but I thought we shot the ball much better than we did last Tuesday, shared the ball better, and really forced the pace with our pressure which is how we want to play. I thought our guys did a really good job of that. When we do that, we end up with a couple or maybe three guys in double figures in scoring and the score is much higher. But overall we did a much better job of forcing the pace tonight.”
Leading the team in scoring was senior Robbie Ritcher with 22 points followed by Miles Scheleder with 20 points, including six made three pointers, and Hayes Pounds with 16 points.
Thomas Watson led the team in rebounds with 10 followed by Ritcher with seven.
While being the final home game for the Texans, it was also senior night which honored two lone seniors on the team in Ritcher and Colby Gold.
“Just two really selfless guys,” Whitten said. “They work really hard in practice and do whatever we tell them to do. Robbie is doing a really good job with him leading the state in charges taken. He sacrifices his body, gets beat up all the time, guys running over him. Colby does a lot of the dirty work with getting rebounds and defensive steals. He is not a huge scorer but he is willing to do the dirtier work to make us successful. Those guys are just awesome with great attitudes and it’s just a pleasure to have them in our program. They set great examples for the younger guys coming up.”
In their loss to Boerne, The Greyhounds were solid on defense.
“They do a great job defending,” Whitten said. “Boerne had a couple of special defensive assignments for Hayes and Miles who are two of our biggest scorers. We didn’t shoot the ball around the perimeter very well. Anytime you are playing these guys you are going to give up perimeter shots and we had those opportunities it’s just we didn’t capitalize on them. I thought our kids played really hard on defense and competed the best we could. Some nights the shots just don’t fall and unfortunately it was one of those nights. But I told them if you keep playing that hard every single night you are going to win a lot of games.”
