(Story by Stephen McDaniel)
Before the ball even tipped off, the Ankeny Centennial boys’ basketball team was battling some adversity.
The Jaguars were already dealing with a recent string of injuries and illnesses, all while having to travel out to Waukee on Friday to face the sixth-ranked Warriors.
Centennial fell into a hole early on and went on to suffer a 62-41 loss in the CIML Conference matchup.
“We knew we were going to have to be at our best to have a chance, and we had an unfortunate situation with one of our starters getting hurt in warmups,” said Centennial coach Bob Fontana.
Going into Friday’s matchup, the Jaguars were already down one key component to the lineup with sophomore Evan Abbott missing his third straight game.
Abbott, one of the team’s leading scorers, suffered a stress fracture in his foot and is set to miss the rest of the season.
Centennial suffered another blow just before tip-off against the Warriors.
Sophomore Luke Mitchell, who was starting his third game for the Jaguars, came down on a ball during pregame warmups. Mitchell attempted to play through his injury, but was absent from the game after the first couple of minutes.
“I could write a book about this season,” Fontana said. “We had four preseason injuries. During the season, we’ve had (Owen Liechti)’s situation, now Luke getting hurt in warmups. Then we’ve been dealing with sickness, too. On Monday and Tuesday this week, we only had nine guys at practice each day because we had so many kids sick.”
Despite the losses of Abbott and Mitchell, the Jaguars did get a boost to the lineup with Liechti cleared to play some minutes.
The junior appeared in five games and started one at the beginning of the season, but has been dealing with a nagging ankle injury.
During the football season when Liechti was an all-district second-team selection as an offensive tackle, he sprained his ankle a couple of times. Then, during the first week of basketball practices, Liechti suffered another bad sprain.
He missed some more time from the court by tweaking his ankle right around Christmas break. Fortunately for the Jaguars, their 6-foot 7-inch forward is back in action and gives the team a strong defensive and rebounding presence in the paint.
“He gave us a handful of minutes in the second half and just tried to get back into some kind of game shape,” Fontana said of Liechti. “I thought his minutes were valuable when he was in because he had five rebounds and had a couple nice defensive possessions. That was a positive for us.”
Cayden Clark and Cabryn Klingner scored a couple of early buckets to give the Jaguars 2-0 and 5-4 leads respectively, but any kind of upset bid ended there.
Waukee got hot from outside the arc and had too many different scoring threats for Centennial to keep track of as the Warriors built up a 21-10 lead by the end of the quarter. While the Jaguars tried to stay close, they just couldn’t keep pace.
They trailed by 16 points despite a 10-4 run at the end of the half and were outscored 15-12 and 9-7 during the third and fourth periods.
Klingner and senior Sean Tunks were Centennial’s top scoring threats. Klingner scored 10 of his 12 points in the first half, while Tunks had seven points in the second half and finished with a team-high 13.
“They got off to a really hot start and hit seven 3s in the first half,” Fontana said. “In the second half, when we tried cutting into the lead in the third quarter, there were approximately half a dozen possessions where we got good stops on defense, we came down–sometimes had numbers–and threw the ball away. You can’t do that against a good team.”
Waukee improved to 10-2 in the league and 11-3 overall. Centennial’s records dropped to 0-12 and 2-12.
Getting the lineup healthy remains a top priority for the Jaguars, who will step out of conference play on Saturday for a non-conference game at Des Moines Lincoln. Tip-off is at 4 p.m.
The Railsplitters are 6-8 on the season.
