Petersburg High School’s basketball teams added two more wins each over the weekend.
The boys team won two games in Craig, beating the Panthers 62-33 on Friday and 71-25 on Saturday.
Coach Rick Brock said his team struggled to score at first on Friday but was firing on all cylinders the next day.
“On Friday I thought we were getting really good looks but just the ball wasn’t going in,” Brock said. “The lead just kind of kept creeping up and then about halfway through the third quarter we had a nice run. And we ended up finishing the game real strong and were successful. Then on Saturday, I think we went the whole first quarter without missing a basket. Our defense was excellent, we got out in transition well and then on our half court offense we were just real precise and everyone’s working really well together and putting the ball in the basket. So we got off to a really nice start on Saturday and just kept rolling.”
In Friday’s game Brayden Larson led the Vikings in scoring with 18 points, while Thomas Durkin added 15 and Rylan Wallace scored 10. On Saturday, Wallace led scoring with 23 points while Larson put in 13. Gunnar Payne scored eight both nights.
Coach Brock thought Wallace had a strong weekend, especially on Saturday.
“I don’t know what his statistics were for the game on Saturday but he just shot the ball extremely well,” Brock said. “He really got us rolling in the first part of that game. He was getting good looks but the shots, he was doing a great job of getting himself in good comfortable scoring positions and then knocking them down. He had a really good Saturday game and really for the whole time, for the weekend. Everybody played well. Aidan Luhr on Saturday had one of his better games too. I think he ended up with seven points. I don’t know if that’s his high for the year or not but…Yeah contributions from a lot of different people. And I think that’s one of our strengths this year, is that at different times people have just stepped up and played well. We did it collectively. I’ve been kind of waiting to see what would happen and then on Saturday we got a good glimpse of that if we’re all hitting on the same cylinders.”
The Vikings improve to 16-2 on the season. They’re in control of the top seed in the region if they can win their final two regular season series against Wrangell and Haines.
Meanwhile, the Lady Vikings improved their record to 8-8 with home wins over Craig. Petersburg won 51-46 on Friday night and 52-39 on Saturday.
Girls coach Dino Brock thought the two games had a pretty different feel.
“Friday we gave up 46 points, he said, adding, “They shot 29 free throws. We were just I think a little overly aggressive on defense, lot of reaching. The game stopped a lot. On Saturday, not anywhere near that, gave up about half that many free throws, so the game kind of flowed a little bit better. And we ended up taking away a bunch of their easy points that they had the first night.”
Top scorer for Petersburg both nights again was Kaili Simbahon with 25 points Friday and 23 on Saturday. Ines Larson added 11 points in both games.
Brock thinks his team is improving.
“There’s still a lot of work to do, offensively, defensively but the fact that we could put up 51 and 52 points against a team that played that hard shows how we’re capable of playing, especially on the offensive end,” he said.
Both boys and girls teams will be in Wrangell for homecoming games this Friday and Saturday. The regular season wraps up with home games against Haines at the end of the month.
