The West Plains Wolves went further than any other boys basketball team in the school’s young history by reaching the Class 4A Division I state semifinals Tuesday evening.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough against a school which had been further than anybody else last year, and showed the Wolves why this year.
West Plains ran into defending state champion Dallas Kimball at Wichita Falls Legacy and found out the Knights were as good as advertised. Kimball never trailed after the opening minutes and cruised to a 67-53 win to advance to Friday’s state championship game at San Antonio’s Alamodome against Almeta Crawford.
The Wolves (31-5) struggled to stay with Kimball (22-11) after the midway point of the second quarter. While they never seriously threatened in the second half, they didn’t slink away quietly.
“We kept fighting and possession slowly kept creeping our way back in it,” West Plains coach Kendall Cogburn said. “It was the things we worried about a little bit too much. (The Knights) do a fantastic job of turning live ball turnovers into baskets and on the boards. They’re super quick and have great instincts.”
Kimball took the lead for good after Kayden Gray hit three free throws following a foul on a 3-point attempt to make it 5-4. Gray had nine points in the first quarter and was a thorn in the side of West Plains all night with a game-high 26 points.
The Knights opened the second quarter with a 10-0 run before the Wolves responded with six straight points to make it 23-16. However, Kimball scored the last eight points of the first half for a 31-16 halftime lead.
That symbolized the uphill climb West Plains faced most of the night.
“It’s all the things in between,” Cogburn said. “It’s not us feeling like they were scoring on our defense or us struggling on offense. It was them beating us on the things in between. They dominated us on the rebounds most of the night.”
The game looked like it might turn into a rout in the third quarter, as Kimball went up by as many as 21 points. West Plains didn’t shrink though, and Reid Macon’s 3-pointer just before the third quarter buzzer narrowed Kimball’s lead to 46-34.
However, West Plains got no closer than that.
“I’ve been so proud of these guys for so long,” Cogburn said. “I wasn’t shocked because I knew they had fight. It’s just not in their DNA to lie down or back down. We just wish the ball would have bounced our way a couple of more times.”
The Wolves did have four players score in double figures, as sophomore Beckett Jones led the way with 12 points. Macon and Ayden Larra scored 11 and Ethan Gilliam added 10.
It didn’t help, though, that Macon fouled out early in the fourth quarter when West Plains still had a shot.
What did in the Wolves just as much was Kimball’s deadly accuracy at the free throw line. Kimball made 25-of-27 free throws.
It was a tough ending to a historic season. In only their fourth year of varsity basketball, the Wolves went unbeaten in District 4-4A and fell two wins short of a state championship.
“The biggest thing to be is there’s a lot of guys who made this work and it may not have always been the guys who were scoring,” Cogburn said. “It may be the role players who don’t get the minutes. It just took a lot of guys to buy into a positive culture for us to get here. We had a couple of guys who started last year who came off the bench this year and never batted an eye about it.”