The City High Boy’s Basketball team set a new school record in a 40-22 win against Cedar Rapids Kennedy.
In what was a defense-laden game was later confirmed that the 22 points the Little Hawks allowed Friday night was the fewest in school history. The previous record was 24 points in the 1985-1986 season.
The started off very slow for both teams. The score after one quarter of play was 6-6.
“I think it was more of the defensive strategy,” said City coach Adam Loria citing the low score, “the offense struggles were more a by-product of how well the defenses were playing.”
The rest of the game would belong to City. After Kennedy jumped to an 8-6 lead, City held the Cougars scoreless for nine and a half minutes during which included a 19-2 run to build a 25-10 lead going into the 4th quarter.
Kennedy would never recover from the run and the Little Hawks wouldn’t look back en route to a 40-22 final.
City senior Ronald Thompson led the charge ending the game with a season high 16-point performance, scoring nearly half the team’s points.
“We lost that game on Tuesday by one point on a buzzer beater so we felt all that pain and madness so we brought that into today,” said Thompson, referring to City’s Tuesday night 51-50 loss at Dubuque Senior where the Ram’s Kyle Holdridge received a 35-ft lob down the court and put a shot through the net as time expired.
“We changed some things up, we got in foul trouble. It forced us to do something different. We didn’t anticipate playing that much zone coming into tonight.” said Loria.
The win moves City to 6-9 (3-7 MVC). The loss drops Kennedy to 10-4 (7-4 MVC).
The Little Hawk’s next match is Tuesday night against #3 Linn-Mar, a team that features North Carolina signee Marcus Paige who is coming off a school record 46 points in a one point win at Prairie.