South Elgin dumps East Aurora as Smith gets to 1,000
Most high school basketball players' dreams aren't as satisfying as the reality South Elgin guard Matty Smith experienced in Thursday's 71-69 road win at East Aurora.
A junior, Smith not only scored the 9 points he needed to join the 1,000-point club in his third varsity season, he finished with 19, highlighted by a furious end-to-end drive for the contested game-winning layup with a second left on the clock.
Smith becomes the fourth boys basketball player in the Fox Valley area to surpass 1,000 points this season. He joins older sister Becca Smith, now a junior at Loyola, in the 1,000-point club. Becca Smith finished her high school career with 2,038 points.
"It's definitely exciting," Matty Smith said. "The big thing is we got the win. If that all came in a loss, it wouldn't mean as much."
South Elgin (9-15, 4-6 Upstate Eight Valley) led 30-12 in the second quarter but East Aurora (5-15, 1-8) trimmed the deficit to 36-29 by halftime and 57-51 after three quarters.
The Tomcats tied the game three times in the fourth quarter, the last coming on a basket by Ron McBride with 10 seconds left, a play set up by a drive-and-dish by guard Anthony Peters.
"The last penetration we got it to Ron McBride and he made a layup so at the end we did pretty good," East Aurora coach Wendell Jeffries said. "We probably would have gotten over the hump, but we missed two open threes late in the fourth quarter, some pretty good looks but we didn't knock them down."
After McBride knotted the game at 69 apiece, South Elgin sophomore guard Collin Uveges gathered the ball from the end-line bleachers and inbounded to Smith. He drove the length of the court, cut across the lane from the right elbow and made an acrobatic scoop shot against his body with a defender in his face.
"I saw we were taking some time to get the ball inbounds so I started yelling timeout but they didn't grant it," South Elgin coach Matt Petersen said of the final sequence.
"Look, I want (Smith) full speed going down the floor in those situations because he is tough to keep up with in the full court. And the type of shot that he made at the rim was a big-time shot. I mean, that was a challenged shot that he had to come across the hoop, use his inside hand and put a little spin on it just to get it to bounce back toward the rim. It was an incredible shot to make and a big pressure-time play."
The Storm also benefitted from a bounce-back performance from talented freshman Anthony Lynch. Two nights after he was limited to 8 points in a 22-point loss at rival Bartlett, he led the Storm with 20 points on 6-of-11 shooting.
"I was just trying to prove myself after the Bartlett game because I wanted to prove I could play with the team," Lynch said.
Six-foot-9 junior Tyler Hankins finished with 12 points, 10 rebounds and 6 blocks, and Justin Howard, Julian Lynch and Logan Atkins each scored 6 points for South Elgin, which returns to action Saturday at West Aurora at 6 p.m.
East Aurora's Adrian Smith, who sank four 3-pointers, led all scorers with 22 points. Peters scored 17 points, highlighted by a pair of fourth-quarter, game-tying jump shots. Sophomore Maurice Nichols added 9 points for the Tomcats, who host the Ernie Kvisto Shootout on Saturday.