West Ottawa Grabs 45 Rebounds to Power past Rockford
By Jeff Chaney / The Grand Rapids Press

The West Ottawa boys basketball team went into Tuesday's game against visiting Rockford with a noticeable size advantage. And Panthers coach Von Washington knew his team had to take advantage of that size advantage if West Ottawa was going to beat the defending Class A state champions.

Washington's team responded, dominating the inside and out-rebounding the Rams almost two to one in a 51-41 non-league game. " For us to have success, we had to have the ball in our hands and take care of it," said Washington, whose team improved to 8-4. " One of the things that we put up on the (blackboard Tuesday night) was rebounding, because if we didn't out-rebound them we didn't feel we had a chance to beat them." The Panthers out-rebounded the Rams 45-26.

And it was a key stretch of rebounding that gave West Ottawa a big lift when Rockford was close to stealing the win away late in the fourth quarter. After being up by as many as 12 points early in the fourth quarter, the Panthers saw the Rams cut the lead down to two, 45-43, with just over two minutes to play. That's when senior center John Tiemeyer had the key play of the game, going up for three offensive rebounds and a basket that pushed West Ottawa's lead to 47-43 at the 2:13 mark of the fourth quarter.

And then a pair of rebounds and two free throws by junior guard Kevin Ludwig put the game away with just under 10 seconds to play. " We are very excited about the rebounding effort on everybody's part," Washington said. "The guys got in there and really mixed it up, and we came down with a lot of rebounds on both ends of the floor." Besides the rebounding, Rockford coach Steve Majerle also pointed to the fact that his team shot 36.7 percent from the field as another reason for the defeat.

" How we were in this game, I don't know," said Majerle, whose team falls to 8-5 with the loss. "We just couldn't score. They were too big for us, and with us not hitting our jump shots, we don't have a lot of options." Still, the Rams were in the game.

" We were turning the ball over and we were playing against champions," Washington said. "I never negate the fact that Rockford is a team that has players on it that came off of a championship team. They know how to win, and they do the things they know how to do to win ball games. They put a lot of pressure on us, and caused us to turn the ball over."

Senior forward Zach Osburn led the Panthers by scoring a game-high 16 points and grabbing a game-high nine rebounds. Junior forward Ryan DeHaan led Rockford with 14 points and four rebounds.