Huron boys' basketball team competes against Mitchell
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MITCHELL — One point.
That’s all the Mitchell High School boys basketball team needed to send Saturday’s season-opener against Huron to overtime with 1.2 seconds to play.
The Kernels hung around all night, despite a forgetful first quarter and a few scoring droughts along the way, but they still needed just one point when Derek Factor stepped to the free-throw line with the chance to tie the game.
Factor’s shot looked true, but it hit the back of the rim and bounced out, giving the Tigers a 49-48 win in a game where the Kernels shot just 12 of 22 from the charity stripe.
“People are going to say, ‘If we made those free throws at the end we would have won,’ but what they don’t remember is we missed nine other ones throughout the game,” MHS head coach Todd Neuendorf said. “...Everyone always remembers the last one. It takes a lot of guts to go to the rim on a game-winning shot and it takes even more guts to stand up there (at the free-throw line) with everybody looking at you.”
When the horn sounded at the end of the first quarter, most fans inside the Corn Palace likely would not have believed Mitchell had a chance to tie it at the end of the game.
Huron took a 13-0 lead to start and the Kernels didn’t get on the board until Carter Jacobsen hit a foul line jumper with 1:11 left in the quarter as the Tigers led 15-5 after one.
Mitchell wasn’t down for long, though, as a seemingly different team came out to start the second quarter and quickly erased the deficit with an 11-2 run in the first 2:31 and even took the lead at one point before heading into halftime down 25-23.
“I don’t think anything changed, we just kept telling the kids to settle down,” Neuendorf said. “They were nervous and scared. Once we settled down, things came a little bit. When you see that first one go in, there’s a big sigh of relief.”
Mitchell had its share of scoring droughts throughout the game, as both teams struggled to score consistently. The Kernels shot 36.6 percent from the field, while Huron connected on just 31.6 percent of its attempts.