TIGERS BREAK BILLS 48-46

Seventy-five foot heaves or 5-foot one-handers ...

If it's a big shot, Cape Central's Donnie McClinton has been hitting it lately.

McClinton drove through the lane, used a spin dribble to his left, pulled up about five feet in front of the basket, floated and put up a soft one-hander as time expired to give the Tigers a 48-46 win over St. Louis University High Friday night.

The buzzer and an anticipating Cape Central crowd drowned out the sound of McClinton's swish, which gave the Tigers (14-11) their fifth straight win.

"I was confident that it was going in, but I was just full of hope," said McClinton, who, on Tuesday against Sikeston, hit a 75-footer at the end of the third quarter to give Central the momentum it needed to pull out a come-from-behind win. "We've got a lot of confidence going into district. It was a good win -- a good, hard win."

"(Getting to the basket) is what he does best," Central coach Brett Reutzel said. "He got up in the air and knocked it down. It was a good shot."

McClinton finished with a team-high 15 points in the game, Central's last of the regular season.

Just 18 seconds earlier, SLUH's Keith Schunzel scored on a conventional 3-point play on a nifty spin move of his own to knot the game at 46.

After a timeout, Central forward Kelly Illers (nine points, six rebounds, four assists) took the inbounds pass and nearly turned the ball over on a long pass down the left sideline. SLUH's Kevin Doherty stole the ball, but stepped out of bounds when trying to gain possession.

Central still had the ball with :7.5 left, but the play Reutzel had drawn up during the timeout was no longer possible.

"I thought we could get the ball up the court real quick and we could run motion and take the first open look we had," Reutzel said. "When it got kicked out of bounds, Donnie looked at me and said `I got it.'"

"I just wanted the ball," McClinton said. "If I didn't have anything, I was just going to dish off and I'm sure any one of our players would have stepped up and hit the shot."

The dramatic conclusion wouldn't have been necessary if Central would have taken care of its 15-point lead.

The Tigers led 35-20 with 4:33 left in the third and led 36-31 going into the fourth quarter, but Doherty put on a one-man offensive show and personally put the Junior Billikens back in the game, scoring 17 points in the final 10 minutes of the second half.

"He played extremely well and got us back in the game," said SLUH coach Don Maurer, who coached at Notre Dame High School in the mid 1980s.

While Doherty and McClinton were showing off their offensive skills, Central's Ross Conner was in the defensive spotlight, blocking seven shots. He also scored seven points and grabbed five rebounds.

"He's a nice player," Maurer said. "We kept taking it at him and he kept blocking them, but we weren't going to back down."

Both teams came out lethargic in the first quarter. SLUH took a 10-8 lead into the second quarter.

"I thought we were awful sluggish in the first half and couldn't get things going offensively," Maurer said. "We picked it up in the second half. One of the things about this team (SLUH) is that we always play so hard. I didn't feel we played as hard as we normally do in the first half."

Central made just one of nine 3-pointers in the first quarter, while taking only four 2-point attempts.

"We were struggling to get the ball inside," Reutzel said. "We weren't patient enough."

In the second quarter, SLUH (14-9) opened up a lead as large as six, before Central went on 13-2 run to end the first half with a 23-18 lead.

Central continued its hot shooting in the early third quarter, extending its 13-2 run to a 25-4 run.