Clovers come up short against mighty Mounties

Cloverdale's boys' basketball team looked to make it three wins in a row Thursday night when it traveled to Southmont.

The Mounties, ranked in the Class 3A at different points of the year, showed that they deserved those votes after beating the Clovers 68-50.

Against a team as solid as Southmont, Cloverdale needed a good start to the game but got anything but that kind of opening.

The Clovers were down 7-0 before getting their first bucket of the game through junior Zach Dorman and found little other offense as they trailed 15-6 after one quarter of play.

Southmont came out swinging in the second quarter by going on an 8-2 run that increased the lead to 15 points and threatened to break the game open.

The visitors managed to knock down a trio of three-pointers to keep things competitive, but it was on the boards where the hosts did most of their damage.

Offensive rebounds kept the Mountie offense, which shot at a lower percentage than Cloverdale did, constantly on the attack.

One particular second-quarter series saw the home side grab three consecutive boards and finally get to the free-throw line after four chances to score.

Another proved costly as the Clovers, who had gotten the score down to 34-21, gave up a basket, a foul and a missed free throw that was put back in by the Mounties, leading to a 38-23 halftime lead.

Southmont tried to put the game to bed and scored the opening six points of the second half to take a 44-23 lead.

The visitors outscored the Mounties 12-7 over the final six minutes of the quarter and, after nearly seeing a Kedrick Collet shot drop at the buzzer, took some momentum into the fourth quarter.

The hosts were ready to finish the game and re-established their 21-point lead at 60-39 and, while the Clovers closed the game stronger, the gap was too much for the visitors to overcome.

Cloverdale head coach Pat Rady said that despite the loss, there were a lot of good things that the Clovers accomplished against the Mounties.

"We made some great runs and at one point in the second half, we got it down to 12 points," Rady said. "The next thing we knew, it was back up to 20.

"Southmont's a good ball club. They're going to make runs and we made runs against them. There are still things to work on but there were some things tonight that we were pleased with.

"We stopped them from doing things that they do pretty well but we've got to hit the good shots," Rady added. "We missed some awful' good shots and that's the way the ball bounces sometimes."

Amidst the positive takeaways from the game, the rebounding edge Southmont had was the biggest concern Rady had from the night.

"The only thing that we were unhappy about was Southmont's offensive rebound," Rady said. "We didn't block out and didn't execute on that part of the defense.

"Other than that, I was not unhappy with the things we did tonight. Southmont went to the boards strong. That's part of their conditioning and that was evident tonight."

Cloverdale will take a step out into a new direction next week when the squad travels to Greenwood Christian for the first ever meeting between the two schools.

The Cougars, in their seventh full season as a basketball member of the IHSAA, may be a new school on the schedule but as Rady noted, the Clovers needed to keep working on their own game.

"A couple of the offensive sets that we ran were new and one of them we put in Wednesday night," Rady said. "We worked on it for 20 minutes and we're very pleased with some of the looks we got.

"We were pleased in that aspect but we still have to work on defense and defensive rebounding. Those were the two areas where we were weak tonight."

At Southmont
Cloverdale 6 17 12 15 -- 50
Southmont 15 23 13 17 -- 68