The West Lowndes High School boys basketball team loves to face a zone defense.
The Panthers’ shooters have the green light from coach Roosevelt Bridges to tee off from downtown, and Amory High found out Saturday how deadly they can be.
West Lowndes (7-6) hit seven 3-pointers and held off a brief Amory rally for a 61-51 win at the Joe Horne Columbus Christmas Invitational.
Senior forward Wendell Rieves made four 3-pointers and finished with 12 points. D’Quaylon Brown, CJ Smith, and Marcus Farmer sank the others.
“Amory backed up on us a bit, playing a 2-1-2 zone,” Bridges said. “We shoot it really good, and if a team plays zone, our guys can hit shots against it. We have several shooters, and really, our starting five are all in that group.”
West Lowndes didn’t play in the Joe Horne Invitational on Friday, but it used an 81-58 victory against West Oktibbeha to snap a two-game losing streak.
“We still need to improve our rebounding. We did that much better last year,” Rieves said. “If we do that, we can get back to Jackson. Other than that, I think we’re playing good.”
Rieves set the tone in the first half, notching three steals and scoring 11 points. The Panthers led by as much as 14.
“(Rieves) is a senior, and he knows what I want,” Bridges said. “He’s a good ball player, and he’s our captain. We need this kind of game from him a lot more.”
Amory (0-8) has one senior and two juniors under veteran coach Todd Hutchinson, who is in his first season at Amory and is the program’s 11th coach in nine seasons.
Despite the loss, Hutchinson praised his players’ effort, which saw Amory claw to within two in the third quarter. Five players scored in a 12-3 run, but five consecutive turnovers saw Amory’s deficit grow to 10 by the start of the fourth quarter.
“We started executing,” Hutchinson said. “But then you run into those couple of minutes, like where we had the four or five turnovers in a row and you have that lapse, get ahead of themselves, and team runs out to a lead.
“It’s tough, but we have to keep getting better.”
Austin Watkins led Amory with 14 points. Kamden Parks added 10.
Smith added 15 and Brown had 14 for West Lowndes.
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