Drye lights fire with halftime speech

Oh to be a fly on the wall in the Aurora Central locker room Friday night when the Chargers went to halftime of the Class 3A Woodstock North sectional championship game trailing Rockford East 38-31.

Except you didn't need to be a fly on the wall. Chargers coach Nate Drye broke into his halftime speech to a group of reporters following his team's come-from-behind 85-82 victory.

"I thought we were giving it to them," Drye said. "We are better than that. We were in a sectional final and I thought we didn't give it our best shot in the first half. Let's go! It's 16 minutes to DeKalb! Let's go, let's play."

That the Chargers did, finally catching the E-Rabs at 72-72 when Ryan Harreld drained a long 3-pointer with 10 seconds left in regulation. Joe Medgyesi hit the go-ahead 3-pointer midway through overtime, and the Chargers will indeed be playing in DeKalb at 6 p.m. Tuesday night against Rock Island.

Harreld said Drye's halftime speech certainly had an affect on the team.

"Coach kind of got on us at halftime," Harreld said. "It wasn't a soft speech at halftime, he really got on us. We came out pumped up."

Harreld led the Chargers with 22 points. He was one of four players in double figures, a group that included Tim Fernandez with 16.

"We got in there, everybody's heads are down," Fernandez said of the scene at halftime. "Our coach just said we have to do it, we have to have faith."

Fernandez said that shortly after cutting down his piece of the net, though after hitting 3 of his 11 free throws the net wasn't all he wanted to bring down. His 15 points were a big key in the win.

"Something about these rims, I don't like them. We should take them down too," Fernandez said with a big smile on his face, then explained what was going on with the Chargers shooting 9-for-30 at the free-throw line.

"I can't focus. This kind of atmosphere is not something you get used to. I let it get the best of me. The fans got the best of me. It was hard to play through something like that because every time you miss you hear a roar from the other side."

Now Fernandez and his teammates will get to hear that roar one more time on the big stage at Northern Illinois' Convocation Center.

We'll see what Drye has up his sleeve for motivation this time.

"I didn't want them to go out and after the game be like we could have done this or that, we could have played harder or we could have played smarter," Drye said of his halftime talk.

"Our guys kept playing, things weren't going our way. They have been through the wars. They have been in big stages."+