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Home > Articles > High School Sports > Frontenac captures EOSSAA triple-A basketball title
Frontenac captures EOSSAA triple-A basketball title
Posted: February 20th, 2014 @ 4:13pm
By CLAUDE SCILLEY
It took about three minutes for all the drama to evaporate from Thursday's eastern Ontario senior AAA basketball game but it remained an important contest for the Frontenac Falcons - and not just for the fact that winning it qualified them to go to OFSAA.
It was an opportunity to let everyone play some meaningful minutes.
"When you go to OFSAA it's hard to get everyone in," Falcons coach Suche James said after his team easily defeated the Thousand Islands Pirates of Brockville 53-22. "Same with the KASSAA final.
"It's always nice to reward those kids that don't play as much with playing in a significant game. Today was one of those games."
Normally the Falcons will play about seven men deep. That leaves a handful of players who may not see the floor for games at a time. Thursday they all got significant minutes as the starters were all on the bench by the middle of the third quarter, most of them for keeps.
Playing in a packed Frontenac gym, every Falcon but one hit the scoresheet as the bench players combined to score 17 points, including six in the fourth quarter by Mohammad Bhatda, who was 3-for-4 from the free-throw line and nailed a three-point basket.
"They deserve to be out there as much as possible," James said, "and today was their game to do that."
Frontenac led 16-2 late in the first quarter, 30-14 at halftime and Thousand Islands, the only AAA school in EOSSAA outside of the Kingston Area Secondary Schools Athletic Association, didn't get a basket in the third quarter.
The Falcons were expected to win handily and James conceded that it isn't always easy to play such games, where the level of competition doesn't match the magnitude of the outcome.
"Our guys had the right attitude, though," he said. "It can be very difficult. You can take the opponent for granted. Sometimes a Kingston school will look ahead of what's out there in eastern Ontario and think that it's going to be no problem.
"Our guys haven't done that all year so I wasn't too worried. There have been groups where I've been very worried about it but this is not one of them."
That's because, James explained, of where the Falcons came from.
"Our start was so disastrous in December," he said. "They know how good they can be but they know how bad they can be, too, and it's always stuck with them. It's never been an issue. We got humbled very early and it's paid dividends."
Carter Matheson scored 12 points for Frontenac before taking a seat about two minutes into the second half. Tristan Halladay scored nine points, all of them in the first half, while Hoadley Raymond, the only starter to play much at all in the fourth quarter, scored seven.
Thousand Islands, which next year will get reclassified as a AA school, got seven points from Ryan Morrison.
Frontenac will now advance and represent EOSSAA at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations triple-A championship tournament in Welland, March 3-5.
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