It’s not the first time this team’s fallen down early, in fact, Buckingham County has had a knack for coming back from early deficits. With under a minute left, it looked the Knights had escaped again — they were up one with the ball after coming back from a tough first half. Even after a costly turnover, the Knights still had a chance to win after they tied the game on a Caleb White front end free throw, and Cam Johnson recovered the rebound with 14 seconds left on the second foul shot. That made the next play even harder to swallow.
“Give Jamie Dailey credit, he made a heck of a steal there, no doubt about it,” said Knights coach Russ Gowin.
Coming out of a timeout Dailey managed to deflect Buckingham’s inbound pass, push it up court and hit a layup with 10 seconds to go to put his team ahead. The Knights got off a pair of forced shots as the buzzer rang, but neither fell through and the Statesmen rolled out of Dillwyn with the James River District tournament semifinal win, 62-60.
“Give credit to Buckingham, I knew they weren’t going to make it an easy game — we get up for them and they get up for us,” said Statesmen coach James Graves. “We just fought and that’s all we can do. Jamie’s a wonderful defensive back in football so in the time out we drew it up for him to go up and get the ball. The rest was history.”
Randolph-Henry controlled the game from the start all the way until the middle of the third quarter. Buckingham trailed by nine points late in the second quarter, and still a few minutes into the third, but started to get rolling shortly there after as White was able to make it a 1-point game with a trio of lay-ups leading a 10-2 run from the Knights.
The Statesmen answered with six straight points to follow to reinflate their lead, but Cam Johnson led another surge for Buckingham and a Tarian Ayrers 3-pointer at the end of the third quarter had the game tied at 46. Kevin Bolden gave the Knights their first lead of the second half on a 3-point play to open up the fourth quarter, but Brent Jones and the Statesmen kept pace. In the final three minutes of play Buckingham spent seeming the rest of the game at the free throw line in the double-bonus. After hitting 15 of their first 18 foul shots in the first half, the Knights shot 8 of 16 in the second half.
“We missed an awful lot of free throws at the end and that really hurt us,” Gowin said. “Between that and the two turnovers, we got ourselves. Usually its us that’s on the other end of games like this but they made the great play at the end. It was a great game though. I was really proud of my kids for coming back like they did.”
White finished the game with a team high 17 points. The junior also had five rebounds, two steals and three assists. Bolden just missed out on a double-double with 10 points and eight boards. Tarian Ayres had 12 points and six rebounds.
For the Statesmen, Jones led all scorers with 22 points while Khari Jenkins was close behind with 19. Randolph Henry now plays Amelia in the JR finals.
Buckingham (14-4) is still in position for the Region B playoffs but will have to hit the road. Gowin’s team has not lost two games in a row, and he’s hoping his squad can bounce back from the gut wrenching feeling of having this game slip away.
“We’re just going to get back in the gym and practice on doing the little things that we usually do right,” Gowin said. “We did a lot of good things night, there were just a few crucial mistakes. But we’ll keep working.”
