BY MACK McCLURE
mmcclure@gbtribune.com
This is a time for the Great Bend High School Panthers to dig down deep and have some intestinal fortitude, like they did late last season in making a run to the Class 5A state basketball tournament.
After playing one of their best halves of the season Friday night in building a 31-28 halftime lead over Liberal, the Panthers couldn’t duplicate that effort in the second half.
Especially in the fourth quarter, where Liberal outscored the Panthers 19-6 to register a 57-47 Western Athletic Conference victory at Panther Fieldhouse.
Liberal improved to 8-6 overall, 2-1 in the WAC, while the deflating loss dropped the Panthers to .500 (7-7, 2-2).
“We didn’t close it out,” Great Bend head coach Chris Battin said. “When you have teams on the ropes, you got to make sure you close it out.
“(Liberal) kept chipping away and chipping away. When they took the lead, it was the wind out of sails and they just cruised from there.”
Liberal’s Jade Cathey, a 6-foot-3 senior power forward, who has signed a full-ride scholarship to play football at Kansas State University, sparked the Redskins coming off the bench. He scored a game-high 15 points, while his presence on the defensive end resulted in altering Great Bend’s shots. He had three blocks.
“He did a great job,” Battin said of Cathey. “He’s a good player and we all knew that going in. I thought we did a pretty good job on him.
“We let some role players step up and kind of killed us and you can’t allow that to happen.”
Slader McVey’s basket from the left wing with 1:58 remaining in the fourth quarter gave Liberal a 47-46 lead after a Greg Hildebrand basket for the Panthers at the 3:44 mark.
Cathey scored in the paint with 1:32 remaining, making it 49-46, and then the ’Skins made a march to the free-throw line to score their final seven points.
Dakota Ellis making 1 of 2 free throws was the only points Great Bend scored down the stretch after Hildebrand’s basket midway through the fourth quarter.
Hildebrand, plagued by foul trouble in the second half, finished with a team-high 12 points. Ellis totaled 10 points.
“It just comes down to being a team,” Battin said. “You can’t ask one player to do it all or two players to do it all. We have to have more of a team effort.”
It didn’t help that the Panthers couldn’t knock down some shots after getting open looks.
“We jumped out to a nine-point lead in the third quarter,” Battin said of the Panthers’ 41-32 lead after a Jace Bowman basket. “We just missed layups and some wide-open 3s, and then we took some bad shots.
“It was just one of those nights where things kind of compounded.
Great Bend led 41-38 after three quarters, but a 9-0 run by Liberal that extended in the fourth quarter, capped by McVey’s 3-pointer with 6:45 remaining, knotted the score at 41.
Ellis’ basket gave the Panthers the lead back at 43-41, but they would only score four more points the rest of the way.
