Plymouth blasts Currituck
Published 10:09 am Friday, December 28, 2012
AHOSKIE – They haven’t played many games, but they’ve made the ones they have played count.
Coming off a championship football run that ended in December with a state title, the Plymouth High boys basketball team got a late start to their season.
So the Vikings entered the 2012 Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald Holiday Classic sponsored by United Country Joe Murray Realty having played just two games while the other teams have averaged playing eight.
But Plymouth also knows that their run to the state basketball final last March may have begun with making the 2011 Classic final, so their coach said they wanted to make this year’s run just as special.
Thanks to a pair of early wins – the latest a 30-point, 65-35, walloping of 3-A Currituck County in the second round of the tournament – the Vikings may have set sail toward that goal.
After an 18-point first quarter, Plymouth played half court basketball for the rest of the first half and still had a 34-point lead at halftime.
Adrian Moore led all scorers with 21 points for Plymouth while Vikings’ low post-man Davonte Spruill had a double-double with 13 points and dozen rebounds.
Two players had seven points apiece to lead Currituck.
“We looked forward to coming over here,” said Plymouth coach Marvin Davenport. “Last year was our first year and even though we started a little late this is good for us.”
Davenport must have meant late on the season because the game started anything but. The Vikings scored the first six points enroute to a 10-0 start, before Knights’ coach Robert Woodley called his first timeout.
Two minutes and 15 seconds later Currituck finally broke the ice with a free throw; but another foul shot and a pair of field goals were all they could muster in the quarter, trailing 18-6.
Plymouth continued to attack the Currituck zone as the second quarter began; and Moore, who’d had 11 of his 15 first-half points in the first quarter, wasn’t able to score so easily in transition this time.
Instead, the Vikings went to a more reliable zone-buster: the jump shot. Their wing players began to fire it up from the perimeter and they outscored the Knights, 11-3, to up the lead to, 29-9.
Woodley called another timeout and the Knights responded with a pair of low-post layups, but Plymouth closed out the half on an 8-0 run with Moore being ‘Mr. Outside’ and Spruill being ‘Mr. Inside.”
Coming out of the break Plymouth added to their 24-point lead by scoring the first six points of the third quarter to give the Vikings their first 30-point lead, 43-13.
It was 47-17 before Currituck closed out the frame on a 6-0 run to get the score down to 49-23.
Davenport began to clear his bench, but Currituck could never sustain a scoring run. Plymouth built their biggest lead, 63-30, still shooting jump shots and getting layups in transition.
The Knights were 4-for-8 in the fourth quarter and put up five more points to the Vikings’ two to make the final margin.
“We must have still been on Christmas break,” joked Woodley. “You make turnovers like we did against a good athletic team like that and you get what you get.”
Plymouth enters tonight’s boys championship game against Hertford County. The host Bears won their opener, 75-43, over the Princess Anne Cavaliers of Virginia Beach.