By Christopher Tenpenny
The Archie basketball team had 11 players score as the Whirlwinds cruised to a 63-26 win over Sherwood Monday night at Sherwood.
The Whirlwinds have several players returning who saw varsity minutes a season ago, but lost a majority of its scoring. Head coach Brian Tenholder said this year, the team can turn to a lot of players to score depending on the game.
“These guys don’t care who scores,” Tenholder said. “They all can do it and they look for each other to score. Sometimes we can be a little too selfless, but the ability is there. When they see it and find a teammate for a score, they are always cheering each other on.”
Briar McIntire led the team in scoring with 17 points. Brunson Tenholder added nine points and Hunter Atkinson had seven points.
“They played together as a team and hustled,” Tenholder said. “We were pursuing offensive boards and our team energy is at a great place to start.”
The game got out of hand in the second quarter, but Sherwood played tight in the first quarter trailing 13-8. The Marksmen were missing some key players due to COVID and ran out of gas.
“The first quarter was great,” Sherwood head coach Justin Eversole said. “We got a little sluggish in the second quarter and being down two starters and a role player due to COVID is tiresome for our team. We just need to bottle up those moments where we do play well and grow from that.”
One bright spot of the Marksmen was freshman Luke Mainard. Mainard led the team in scoring with 12 points and has played well in both of Sherwood’s games this season.
“He’s a monster in the making,” Eversole said. “He did a really good job getting to the basket and played well against Lakeland even if the box score doesn’t show it.”
Roman Riffle and Braden Lassiter each had four points.
Sherwood falls to 0-2 on the season and will look for its first win tomorrow night at Adrian. For Archie, they will play Lutheran tomorrow night at Archie.