Meadows dishes out a winner

Brian Nelms kept delivering the dishes and Mike Dolan and Mike Rose feasted like never before inside Friday night for Rolling Meadows.

Nelms' 13 assists were 1 shy of the single-game school record and Dolan and Rose had career-highs of 22 and 18 points respectively as the Mid-Suburban East leading Mustangs rolled to a 73-57 victory at Wheeling.

"We have so many experienced guards who know how to find us in the right spots and work the offense around," Dolan said. "They're unselfish and they were getting Rose and I the ball. I've been working on finishing a lot in practice."

The 6-foot-2 Dolan missed his first shot but made his next nine for 20 points at halftime as Meadows (10-5, 4-0) lead 47-28. He came in averaging 4.1 points a game but matched his career high of 9 points in the first quarter, hit a pair of 3s and had 7 rebounds.

Not bad for a player whose primary position has always been guard.

"It was a big night for him and I'm really happy for him," Nelms said after taking just 5 shots and scoring 7 points. "We have a lot of weapons."

Rose, who came in averaging 6.9 points with a high game of 15, scored 6 points in the first quarter and 12 in the second half. He shot 8-for-9 from the floor and had 9 rebounds.

Tyler Gaedele added 15 points and hit three 3-pointers and had 3 assists as Meadows shot 51.8 percent from the field (29-for-56).

"They're so unselfish and they don't care who scores, they just want to win," said Meadows coach Kevin Katovich. "That's what makes this group so much fun to coach. They're willing to make the extra pass to get a teammate open."

The Mustangs also used some traping pressure defense to parlay 21 turnovers by Wheeling (0-15, 0-4) into 28 points.

"They're too good offensively to give them any freebies," said Wheeling coach John Clancy. "Part of it is what Meadows was doing and part of it was us being passive.

"At times we show glimpses of being a pretty good basketball team but our consistency throughout is lacking. We're trying to preach that there's nothing for us to be scared of at this point."

Wheeling got 11 points from Nate Majkowski and 10 apiece from Ziggy Jasiunas (6 rebounds), Charlie Kirk (8 rebounds) and Jeremy Stephani (three 3s). A Kirk 3 cut the deficit to 62-48 witih 7:16 left but Meadows answered with a 9-0 run to pull away into next Saturday's showdown at four-time defending East champion Prospect.

"There are a still a couple of things we need to clean up," Nelms said. "We gave up a lot of points."

But he made sure he gave his teammates a lot of them, too.