By Luke Nadkarni / Scrimmageplaycva.com contributor
The William Monroe boys basketball team saw its season come to an end at the hands of Loudoun Valley Thursday night in the Conference 29 semifinals in Stanardsville, as the visiting Vikings used stifling defense in the second half to pull away for a 50-37 victory.
The teams, who had split a pair of regular-season meetings earlier in the year, were separated by just two points at halftime as Loudoun Valley held a 20-18 advantage in the locker room. After Dragons senior Jeff Early scored the first basket of the second half to tie things up, the Vikings held Monroe without a field goal for over 11 minutes.
“[Early] is a tremendous player,” Loudoun Valley head coach Chad Dawson said. “He’s very strong, very confident and he finishes with a lot of contact. He singlehandedly fouled out two of our kids and almost a third.”
The game remained close until late in the third quarter when Valley made its move. With the score tied at 24 at 2:46 left in the period, Jalen Williams sank a pair of free throws and Robert Fox followed with back-to-back three-pointers for a 32-24 lead going into the final quarter.
Things didn’t get any better for Monroe after that. The Dragons managed just one free throw before Keegan Wolford knocked down a trey — Monroe’s first of the game — with 3:57 remaining. By that time, the Vikings had built a 42-28 lead and were beginning to salt the game away. Wolford scored 12 points along with Early to lead the Dragons in scoring.
“It’s gonna be tough losing those guys,” Monroe head coach Mike Maynard said of Early and Wolford. “At least I get to coach them in one more sport.”
Maynard is also the Dragons’ baseball coach.
At the beginning, it looked like Monroe would be the team to cruise to victory. The Dragons scored the game’s first seven points, including five from Anthony Terry, and held a 9-2 lead deep in the first quarter. But Terry didn’t score again and the Dragons went cold while the Vikings heated up, and a layup by Trey McDyre put Loudoun Valley in the lead 12-11 midway through the second quarter. The Dragons never got back in front after that.
“We’ve started slowly a couple times, and that might have bothered us earlier in the year,” Dawson said. “But we were a little more resilient.”
Loudoun Valley also got a pair of 12-point performances from Williams and Fox and shot 5-of-9 from three-point range. William Monroe, by comparison, finished just 2-of-13.
“They packed it around, they did a good job changing their defense, and we couldn’t throw it in the ocean,” Maynard said. “We picked a bad day to play bad.”
