A heartbreaking loss to end the season
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By Dalton Shadle
MOUNT AYR, Iowa — Four quarters were not enough to decide which team’s season got to continue when the Raiders and Martensdale-St Marys met on the court last Thursday in Mount Ayr.
The Blue Devils wound up being the team to move on as Mount Ayr lost a tightly contested 55-51 overtime loss.
The game was a back and forth throughout as neither team could maintain an edge as the first quarter ended with the score tied 11-11.
The Raiders would take a five-point lead into halftime ahead 21-16.
The Blue Devils would come back to tie the game heading into the fourt quarter and would briefly take a lead, before Mount Ayr would tie the game to force overtime with it all knotted up at 46-46.
In overtime the Blue Devils outscored Mount Ayr 9-5 putting an end to the Raiders season.
Walking away with the loss coach Bret Ruggles breaks down the game.
“(It was) just an incredible ball game,” he said. “You get to that level, whereas the top will be 60 teams in the top 32 teams, or even, like on Tuesday, the top 16 teams. You know, you’re looking at really good basketball. And I think people will look at that game and go, Oh, well, you beat Martensdale twice. Well, we did. We beat Martensdale twice before, once by two and once by six. So you knew it was going to be another big ball game. And credit to Martensdale, they did a nice job defensively. They held us at bay a little bit. We had some tough calls, not really going our way, We missed the last four shots of our possessions. They made the last four shots of their possessions. Sometimes, when it gets down to really good teams, it’s going to come down to a couple possessions here and there. And it did. It’s not a knock on anything that we did defensively or offensively.”
In his final high school game Jackson Ruggles led the Raiders with 19 points. Tate Dugan also in his last game led the Raiders in rebounds with nine while. scoring 13 points. Junior Adler Reed scored five points along with five rebounds.
“It just unfortunately, in a game like that, somebody has to go home, and it just, it just ended up being us.” coach Ruggles said.
