Fatigue, late free throws hurt Nixon-Smiley in loss

NIXON — A back-and-forth game between Nixon-Smiley and their rival Stockdale Brahmas ended in turnovers during an in-bound play for the Mustangs, allowing the Brahmas to knock off Nixon-Smiley 42-39 last Friday.

Both teams traded shots in the fourth quarter, with the lead changing hands three times before Stockdale took a 41-39 lead with six seconds left on the clock. After a badly executed in-bounds play by the Mustangs, Stockdale’s Nicholas FitzSimon III was fouled and went to the free-throw line, making one of his two shots to go up 42-39. With 3.5 seconds left, the Mustangs turned the ball over, ending the game with a three-point district loss.

“Our youth really showed,” Nixon-Smiley head coach Carlton McKinney said. “We kind of deviated from the plan late. Our out-of-bounds plays are designed to get the ball in, I think we had a couple of kids [try to] figure out a better way to do it and unfortunately it hurt us.”

“I thought the kids played well,” he continued, “I thought they battled, it’s just, we got to understand the reason we practice the way we practice and we work on the things that we work on is so everyone is on the same page and I thought our last handful of plays we all weren’t on the same page, especially on the defensive end and those two in-bound plays.”

The Mustangs used a five-men in, five-men out type of substitute rotation in the game to keep their players fresh. McKinney explained that the usual rotation was altered due to the first group playing well. Unfortunately, that led to the team getting a bit fatigued late in the game and committing those fouls, allowing Stockdale to shoot 14 free throws in the fourth quarter to Nixon-Smiley’s two.

“That was an error on our part,” he admitted. “We should have got those kids a little break, [sub] in a little sooner. The kids played hard but I thought that was a big factor. I thought they were a little fatigued and when you’re fatigued you don’t slide your feet and do the things defensively that you were doing earlier in the game and it hurt us, it put them on the line.”

The Mustangs dropped a 71-37 decision against Poth on Tuesday to go to 0-2 in District 27-3A. Despite the loss, McKinney believes the talent is there, so long as the young Mustangs execute the game plan.

“Things are working because everyone is aware of what’s going on and everybody is following instructions,” McKinney explained. “Then when you deviate from that, no one knows what you’re doing and that’s what happened late. Fatigue sets in and kids do what they’re comfortable with and we made some mistakes because of that.”