The Mid-Prairie Golden Hawk boys basketball team travels to West Liberty tonight to face Camanche with the class 2A district nine championship on the line. Mid-Prairie enters the game with a 15-7 overall record, they blasted West Liberty to open the playoffs Thursday 65-35 in Wellman behind 17 points from Jackson Pennington and 12 each from Carter Harmsen and Alex Bean. On the season, Mid-Prairie is led by Harmsen at 18 points and seven rebounds per game. Pennington leads the Hawks with five assists and two steals a night.
Camanche is 16-6 on the season, they cruised through Wilton to open the playoffs last week 67-51 led by a 26 points 12 rebound performance from Zach Erwin. Jordan Lawrence added 12 points and Mike Delzell 11. On the season, the Indians are led by Erwin and Lawrence at 15 points per game each. Zayne Feller is best on the glass at seven rebounds. Erwin has a team best four assists per night and Lawrence leads the Indians with three steals per game. This week, Mid-Prairie head coach Daren Lambert talked about his team’s first round win and seeing Camanche a second time. “The talk in the locker room after our win over West Liberty was about playing for our three seniors to continue their season. That sets the culture for the future so that when these younger guys are doing that now, the next classes will do that for them when they are seniors. Jackson Pennington had a great night distributing the ball and scoring for us. We put four in double figures with Aidan Rath having a big night. Alex Bean was good scoring the ball and rebounding and Carter Harmsen did his thing. Looking back at that first game against Camanche, that’s a game that we would circle and say we didn’t play our best. Offensively, defensively, you have to tip your hat and give Camanche credit, they hit a lot of shots. Their intensity was better than ours and we didn’t respond. There was a seven minute stretch in that game, where we looked good and cut that lead. We need to take those things, know we didn’t put the best effort out there, and go get them this time on Tuesday.”
The Golden Hawks fell to the Indians on the road 66-51 in late January with Lawrence scoring 24 points and Erwin 20 while Mid-Prairie got 14 from Harmsen at 13 points from Aidan Rath. The Indians have won eight straight in the series over the Golden Hawks. The winner of this game will advance to Saturday’s substate final at Muscatine against the winner of Pekin and West Burlington. You can hear all of the action live tonight between the Indians and the Golden Hawks on AM 1380, FM 102.5 and KCIIradio.com, beginning with the Washington HyVee pregame show at 5p.m. and tip at 5:30 from West Liberty.