GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Frank Field hit three fourth-quarter 3-pointers and scored 13 of his team-high 18 points Friday to lead the Hoosac Valley boys basketball team to a 62-58, come-from-behind win over Monument Mountain.
“He had a nice one over at Greylock the other night too, he led us,” Hoosac Valley coach Bill Robinson said of Field. “He’s a nice freshman.”
“That guy over there is a nice one, too,” Robinson said, referring to the Spartans’ Khalil Carlson, before adding with a smile that beamed through his face covering, “but I like our guy. I like our guy.”
Monument Mountain led most of the night and had a 14-point lead with two minutes left in the third quarter, but the Hurricanes (6-0) stormed back to lead, 56-46, on a Logan Davis triple with three minutes left in regulation.
But the Spartans (4-2) refused to quit, coming back to tie it, 58-58, on a bucket by Kenzel Chandler-Ellerbe with 45 seconds left.
That set up the game winning play: Logan Davis got the ball to Field at the elbow, and he fed an open Luc Levesque in the post.
Levesque finished to give the Hurricanes a two-point lead.
At the other end, Davis (17 points) grabbed a defensive rebound with 11 seconds on the clock, and Hoosac Valley’s Carson Meczywor (15 points) got to the line for a one-and-one. He missed his first, and Carlson grabbed the rebound with 7.9 seconds remaining.
The Spartans ended up setting up an alley-oop on a sideline inbound at the other end that failed, and Davis went to the line with 1 second on the clock. He made both ends of his one-and-one to givehim 10 points in the quarter and provide the final margin of victory.
“The defense got after it a little bit,” Robinson said of the fourth-quarter comeback. “We got some better looks. We were more aggressive, I think, going to the basket more instead of settling.
“There are two ways to get the ball inside. One is passing it in, and one is driving it in. We started to drive the ball a little bit more than we were, and we weren’t settling so much.”
The comeback actually started when Field drove the right wing for a bucket with 1:30 left in the third quarter to cut the lead to 40-28. The Hurricanes went on to score eight of the final 10 points in the quarter to go to the fourth down just eight, 42-34.
They then scored the first nine points of the fourth quarter to take their first lead since it was 6-5 when Meczywor scored in transition put Hoosac Valley on top, 43-42.
They went on to take a 56-46 lead on Davis’ 3-pointer, finishing a run of 28-6 that spanned the third and fourth quarters.
Instead of folding the tents, Monument Mountain dug deep and went on a 12-2 run to tie it.
It started when Connor Hanavan (game-high 19 points) drove to the basket from the left wing, got fouled and converted a conventional three-point play. Hanavan had two more buckets, including a 3-pointer, during the run that ended with the hoop by Chandler-Ellerbe.
He finished with eight points. Carlson had 10 points, 11 rebounds and three blocks in the loss.
“We came right back and we tied it up,” Monument Mountain coach Randy Koldys said. “We needed to make one more stop, and we didn’t make that one stop.
“It’s a learning process for us. We lost 45 points of scoring from last year. We need to find points, and if we don’t find those points, then we need to defend better. We haven’t worked as hard as we could on defense because we haven’t had a whole lot of practice time to do that.
“But we’ll fine. We’ll get better. We’ve got the second half of the year, and we get [Hoosac] two more times.”
