The following is a detailed account of the YRHS Gr. 9 boys basketball team, results from the East Central District Athletic Association (ECDAA) Championship. The Championship is the top-eight ranked teams in the district play down in a championship tournament. The following teams were involved: YRHS, Churchbridge, SHHS, Canora, Preeceville, Melville Comprehensive, Kamsack and Esterhazy.
The Yorkton Raiders went into the districts with an impressive record of 7-0.
They were also ranked in top spot.
In game one against Churchbridge, YRHS ran off with a 64-19 win. Among others, Grey McKen, Mack Alcorn and Shayan Eftekhari put up double-digit scores.
In game two, they played Canora and doubled them 63-34.
Says coach Perry Ostapowich: "We started this game out with a trap offensive press and it worked really well as we led at the end of the first quarter with a 18-4 lead and were up by 19 points at the half."
He said the team was able to keep the pressure on Canora all game long "which was nice to see".
The other highlight of the game was "the entire team hit the score sheet for this game which was (also) nice".Alcorn and Eddie Schramm put up double-digit scores.
Game three put Yorkton up against Melville and offered a bit of an interesting twist, coach Ostapowich suggested. He had this to say regarding the closest win his team had in the tournament.
"This game we came out really flat and did not have our best shooting game of the season. Melville came out strong and shot well as they started the game with a 6-0 lead and played really tough zone defence."
Then Ostapowich said he decided it was time for something to change in terms of the game plan, and like the senior boys' team when they hosted the Sacred Heart Saints at home on Friday, they worked their way back into the fight.
"We changed our game plan and started working the ball into the key and we were tied with Melville 25-25 at the half."
According to Ostapowich, Melville however was not done yet.
"Melville came out strong in the second half and outscored us 7 -13 in the third quarter."
The fourth quarter was YRHS's chance to get back into it, thanks to some breaks from Alcorn and Brayden Oystrick.
"In the fourth, we got a couple fast break buckets from Braden Oystrick and Mack Alcorn made five foul shots and dropped a couple of buckets put us back in the game resulting in a very exciting last minute of basketball."
Ostapowich said he was very impressed by how the how the boys bounced back from a poor start. "There's no doubt our team defence kept us in the game as McKen and Alcorn did a good job limiting their big post players from getting easy buckets. Oystrick and Ryan Lebo did a good job of working in the ball on offence. Overall this group of boys were hard working and easy to coach as throughout the season. We tried a number of different systems and they had a good work ethic. Tom Schlamp was impressed with how the boys did a good job in transition resulting in a number of uncontested buckets.
