Glenbard South pulls out close one

Glenbard South has grown accustomed to playing close boys basketball games, and Timothy Christian gave the Raiders another one Tuesday night.

“Our past three games have been overtime,” senior Dominique Cisneros-Watson said after the Raiders’ 61-59 victory in Elmhurst, “so now we have some experience with close games. We didn’t want to go into another overtime, so we made sure we finished this one.”

“For the first time in the last few games coming down the stretch — we’ve had a lot of close games, and I thought we learned something out of those — tonight we looked like we were under control and we looked poised,” Raiders coach Wade Hardtke added. “We started holding the ball with about two minutes to go and made them come get us and were able to knock down some free throws and we were just able to finish it out.”

Neither team led by more than 5, and the lead changed hands a few times. The Raiders (9-9, 5-3 Metro Suburban Conference) took the lead for good with just more than two minutes left on a Dusko Despot free throw, then extended the lead by making 5 of 8 at the line the rest of the way.

“It was a good ballgame,” said Trojans coach Jack LeGrand. “We played better than we have the last couple of games. ...They just had a little more in the tank, a couple of extra runs than we had there.”

“We knew coming in it was going to be a hard-fought game, so we had to come in with a lot of intensity,” Cisneros-Watson added. “We really buckled down on defense, made sure the shooters didn’t get off. The first half they did a little bit. The second half we did a better job of shutting them down.”

Despot led the Raiders with 14 points and 8 rebounds. Cisneros-Watson hit four 3-pointers to add 14 points off the bench.

“In warmups it felt pretty good, so I was hoping I could just transition that to the game,” he said of his 3-point shot. “I hit my first two and that felt pretty good. I just kept going from there, had some confidence.”

Jon Berrospi and Matt Jeske each added 12 points for Glenbard South.

Danny Leach hit five 3-pointers and scored 21 points for Timothy Christian (11-11, 3-4), which also had Chris Ridolphi score 15 points and Matt Morrison add 10.

“Danny shot the ball well tonight,” LeGrand said. “He’s capable of doing that. He’s been struggling a little bit, but tonight he got his shot going. Ridolphi played pretty well, Morrison had a pretty good game, and it was right there.”