Valley Basketball: Vikings To Meet Familiar Foe
AKRON – The Tippecanoe Valley boys basketball team should start sectional play as a confident bunch.
The Vikings should also be very familiar with their first-round foe come Tuesday night.
Valley, for the fourth time in the last five years, will face Wawasee in a sectional opener. The Vikings defeated the Warriors 53-42 at home Friday night in the regular-season finale for both squads.
Valley, sporting a 10-13 mark, will square off with the Warriors in the opening game of the Class 3-A Wawasee Sectional. Wawasee enters postseason play at 5-17.
“It’s not a good situation,” said Valley coach Bill Patrick of playing the same team twice in just a five-day span. “We’ve talked about changing the regular season game with Wawasee and moving it to earlier in the season.”
Valley and Wawasee have met in the final game of the regular season since 2002.
Patrick pointed to the importance of the first meeting prior to beating the Warriors.
“I think it’s an important game in that you want to be playing well going into the sectional,” said Patrick Friday morning. “Wawasee is a good team. Their record may not show that, but they have lost a bunch of close games this year. They have a lot of depth.”
The Vikings have been on a roller coaster ride this season. They started the year 2-4 before winning four of their next five games. They then lost six straight before responding to win four of their final six contests.
“I think that we are definitely playing better late in the year,” noted Patrick. “We had a bad game over at Triton, where we shot poorly and just got outplayed by them. But hopefully that was just a one game deal.”
The Vikings, who lost to NorthWood 60-50 in the sectional title game last year, are led by Craig. The senior guard canned 32 points in the win over Wawasee Friday night. He hit 10-11 from the free throw line and scored 13 of his team’s 15 points in the fourth quarter. Craig, a three-sport standout, is averaging 16 points-per-game and leads his team in both assists and steals.
Valley also counts on seniors Jarod Duzenbery and Keith Wright. Duzenbery is averaging 12 points and is the team’s top rebounder. Wright averages 11 points and is the top 3-point shooter for the Vikings. Freshman Tanner Trippiedi has been a solid contributor too for Valley. Duzenbery could be a question mark Tuesday after leaving Friday night’s contest with the stomach flu.
“The thing is that when we play hard we are pretty good,” explained Patrick, who ranks second in state history with his 765 wins in 48 seasons. “We need Alec and Jarod and Keith to score for us. We also need our defense to be a big part of our offense to be successful.”
Valley has not played any of the other teams in the sectional field with the exception of the host Warriors. The Valley-Wawasee winner will face West Noble (8-14) in a semifinal game on Friday night.
“NorthWood is a notch above everyone else in our sectional,” noted Patrick of the No. 2-ranked Panthers, who have won three sectional titles in a row. “They are just better than the other five teams are. I do think that any of the other five teams can get to the sectional final.”
Valley will meet Wawasee at 6 p.m. Tuesday night with NorthWood (20-2) then playing Lakeland (8-14). The NorthWood-Lakeland winner advances to play Fairfield (11-12) in the second semifinal Friday night. The championship game is Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with the winner advancing to the Marion Regional March 11 to play the Bellmont Sectional champion.
Valley has won nine sectional titles with the last coming in 2013.