Miami Trace defeats McClain to stay undefeated

GREENFIELD — The Miami Trace Panthers extended their undefeated season Friday night in Greenfield with an impressive 52-39 victory over McClain which improved their overall record to a perfect 15-0.

The Panthers’ 6-7 junior post-player Adam Guthrie was just too much inside for the much smaller Tiger players to handle. Guthrie finished with a game-high 20 points while pulling down countless rebounds in the ballgame.

“Miami Trace is a really good basketball team,” McClain head coach Jarrod Haines said. “They have a lot of size and length inside which are things that we don’t have much of.”

Senior Jordan Bell drained a couple of threes early in the game and kept McClain close only trailing 9-8 midway in the first quarter, but the Panthers closed out the opening period on a 9-0 run and led by double-digits, 18-8 at the horn.

“Jordan Bell started the game on fire with those two long threes, but Miami Trace is well coached and they started trying to take him out of the flow, and I thought they were able to do that,” Haines said.

The Tigers were able to keep the game reasonably close in the second period after being out-scored 12-8, but still trailed 30-16 at the half.

“I thought my kids played with a lot of heart and we played hard especially at the beginning when we did a pretty good job of taking them out of what they wanted to do,” Haines said. “But you can’t force them into a mistake then turn around and make one yourself, you just can’t win games playing like that against a team that is 15-0.”

Guthrie had a huge first half offensive scoring 16 points for the Panthers and Bell led McClain with eight.

McClain continued playing hard and aggressively in the third period, and actually seemed to out-play Miami Trace when they outscored the Panthers 9-8, but still found themselves trailing 38-25.

Miami Trace put the game away early in the fourth quarter when they went on a 10-4 run, and then coasted to 52-33 Frontier Athletic Conference victory.

“I’m still really proud of my kids because they never gave up and I thought we got some really good minutes from a lot of different people,” Haines said. “Hudson Lovett had another solid game for us, he had 8 points and probably had that many rebounds where he did a great job on the glass and really battled inside,” said Haines.

I thought Zane Adams gave us some good minutes offensively and Owen Sykes was big on the boards for us too. Riley (Cummins) played another great defensive game and distributed the ball well and Julien Evans and Brandon Greene came in and always gives us good minutes, especially on defense.”

Haines continued to talk about how proud of his team he is. 

“Like I said before, I’m proud of my kid’s effort tonight, they continued to play hard the entire game but things just didn’t go our way,” he said. “We’re going to take a couple of days off now and rest up and then come back next week with three games all on the road.”

Five players scored for McClain (7-9) led by Bell with 10 points, followed by Lovett with 8, Adams 7, Sykes and Cummins with 4 each.

Guthrie had a game-high 20 to lead the Panthers followed by Trey Robinette with 13.

The Tigers travel to Piketon Tuesday, Feb. 4 for a non-conference game, then go to Chillicothe on Friday, Feb. 7 in FAC action.