FORT MADISON – It’s been 13 years since the Holy Trinity boys' basketball team has been to a district championship. That mark was reset Thursday night as the Crusaders overcame a sluggish first half to knock off Moravia 55-29 in the Class 1A District 10 semifinals.
HTC will travel now to Ottumwa’s Evans Middle School Tuesday night against North Mahaska (18-6). The game was originally slated for Oskaloosa, but will now be played in Ottumwa beginning at 7 p.m.
The game was fast-paced in the first half with just two total fouls called, one on each team, and lasted a mere 21 minutes with the Crusaders holding a 1-point lead at 19-18.
The second half was a whole different story as Holy Trinity went on an 8-1 run to open the 3rd period highlighted by a couple 3-balls from sophomore Layne Rung.
The Crusaders started the second with some light zone pressure just to throw a different look at the Mohawks and then got some really good inside-out work going on offense.
Moravia, which had its only lead at 2-0, tied things up to start the third period on a freethrow by sophomore Declan DeJong. After that the Crusaders slammed the door, going on a run that extended to 19-4 when Luke Hellige, who led all scorers with 20 points, hit a 3-pointer from the left baseline.
Rung hit his third 3-pointer of the night in the run and senior Conner Gehling took a two-step around the Mohawk defense on the baseline and slammed a two-handed dunk to bring the Crusader faithful to their feet. Gehling would score again inside to give the Crusaders a healthy 40-23 lead heading into the final period.
Rung sent a quick message with back-to-back threes enroute to his 15 second-half points to push HTC’s lead to 21 at 46-25.
Head Coach John Hellige said Rung missed a couple shots in the first half, but he told him to keep shooting.
“The first half he missed a few and sometimes being a sophomore it’s like ‘should I be shooting or should I not be shooting’, and we just told him at halftime if we’re going to pull away from this you gotta shoot otherwise they’ll just suffocate the other guys,” Hellige said.
“And once he hit that first one, he got all the confidence in the world.”
Hellige said the Mohawks played really good defense in the first half and proved they are a solid Blue Grass conference team.
Hellige drew double teams most of the game and Moravia used a smaller guard to front up the junior while bigger defenders waited behind him.
“Luke’s an interesting matchup. If you put a big guy on him, he’s gonna drive around you. If you put a little guy on him, he’ll take advantage of that,” John Hellige said. “A guy his size he does a little bit of everything, but they did a good job of smothering him and then bringing some help inside, but he had a good game.”
Adam Sobczak and Gehling each had eight points in the win. Sobczak still leads the state in assists and had a nice alley-oop to Hellige at the basket from an inbound toward the end of the game.
“My role is just getting people open and finding my teammates. They hit the shots and reward me with the assist,” he said.
He said he wasn’t concerned about coming back after the tight first half, nor playing the next game on the road for the first time in the postseason.
“We’re good on the road, we’re good at home. We just play. I wasn’t concerned tonight, I knew we would pull it off. We weren’t running the court, and our offense wasn’t going. We weren’t running sets, and then in the second half, we did that almost to perfection.”
John Hellige said he isn’t concerned about taking the kids on the road to Ottumwa Tuesday.
“I told them in the locker room - we played 32 games in the offseason and 24 now, so we’ve played 56 games and we’ve played everywhere from St. Ambrose to Monroe City, Mo. And we’ve played great everywhere we went. So I’m not worried about it.”
Rung said the team is playing with confidence and anyone can put up points at any given time.
“We were confident we could beat this team. (Coach) gave a real good speech at halftime and we had a large crowd and we just wanted to come out and get the win,” Rung said.
“This feels great. My brother and Conner are seniors so we want to get the next win and keep moving on.”
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