Cats bounce back big in 63-44 win over Thurman’s Patriots
Aidan Anding made six three pointers in Ruston’s win over Scotty Thurman’s Parkview Patriots on Tuesday. Photo by Josh McDaniel
The Ruston Bearcats took care of business in a unique non-district battle against former RHS star Scotty Thurman and his Parkview Patriots on Tuesday, taking the win 63-44 to improve to 15-8 overall.
It was a tightly contested first half at Scotty Robertson Memorial Gym, with Ruston clinging to a 25-23 lead as both teams’ defenses met the challenge with ball pressure creating transition offense. But the Bearcats turned up the heat more than the Patriots could handle in the second half, especially in the third, to pull away for the win to bounce back after a 62-60 loss at Ouachita on Friday.
“We approached it like a playoff game because you have an opponent you’re not familiar with,” Ruston head coach Ryan Bond said. “For the most part when you have a playoff game, you’re not familiar with the opponent, especially second round and quarterfinals. You have limited scout time and we didn’t have a whole lot of time to scout. But I’m really pleased with the guys and their effort. They bounced back after Friday.
“We won 11 in a row and we didn’t forget how to play basketball. We just didn’t play our best on Friday and there’s some things I could have done differently. But we learned from it and the guys responded,” he continued.
Ruston took control of the game thanks to a 26-6 third quarter, stamped by Aidan Anding nailing a trio of three pointers, Lonnie Dimmer and Joran Parker’s lockdown defense, and stronger connectivity on the defensive end to keep Parkview out of sorts until it was too late for the visitors to get back in the contest.
Anding finished with 20 points on six made threes — shooting 60% from deep over his last four games — while Ahmad Hudson and Dimmer each scored 12 points in the win. Hudson added 12 rebounds and 2 blocks to his ledger as well.
“Aidan’s been really good for us all year and I could see it during shoot-around and he looked really comfortable,” Bond said. “That might be because he got seven Division I offers last week. Excited for him right there. But he looked really good tonight. And I told him, ‘you’re going to be on tonight.’ I just felt it. I feel that about all of them and I’m just proud for them.”
The Patriots, visiting from Little Rock, Arkansas, didn’t give Thurman the homecoming he was hoping for, but the fan favorite enjoyed his return to Lincoln Parish regardless of the outcome.
“ It’s always good to come back home,” Thurman said. “Obviously, I would have liked to have had a better showing than this. But it’s always good to come back and see familiar faces, friends and family.”
Parkview’s Dallas Thomas, a senior post player committed to play basketball at Clemson, scored 19 points — including two late threes by the time the game was out of reach — and ran into trouble in the second half when guarded by Parker, who may have finished with a modest 8 points, but his biggest impact came in not backing down from disrupting the future Division I player’s post-up game.
“ Joran came to me at halftime and said, ‘Coach, I want to guard number 11.’ And I said, ‘you got it,’” Bond said. “He (Thomas) had 11 points there in the first half, and a pretty efficient 11 points. I thought Joran did a really good job on him. The guys know that it’s getting close to crunch time so we know everything is big from now on for us.”
Ruston returns to action Friday in a district contest against ASH at 7 p.m. in Memorial Gym.
It’s an important matchup considering four teams are tied with 2-1 district records, including Ruston and ASH.
