The well-oiled machine that the Brookside offense can be was on display Jan. 30 when the Cardinals hosted Westlake in a boys basketball nonconference affair.
Brookside made 15 3-pointers, with five different players connecting from beyond the arc, and had four players in double figures and another with eight points on the way to a 74-62 victory that wasn’t as close as the final score indicates. Early in the fourth period the Cardinals led by as many as 27 points before the Demons battled back to make the final score respectable.
“This is how it’s supposed to be,” senior point guard Brandon Sharpe said of his team’s efficient offense. “We just moved the ball around and shared the ball. That was the game plan. We knew they were bigger than us. Coach was just talking about how they looked bigger than us and everybody else probably thought it was going to be a loss. But everybody played a team game. We were playing as a team.”
Junior Nolan Waechter led the way with 16 points, including four 3-pointers. The final of his long-range bombs came with 2:21 to play and was the 200th of his career. Waechter was backed by Lincoln Barnhart with 14 points—all in the first half. Sharpe contributed 13 points as well as several steals and assists, and freshman Mason Waechter had 12 points on four 3-pointers.
“You have to give Brookside a lot of credit,” Westlake coach Luke Harris said. “We knew they were going to come out firing. They made them at a high clip, which is a testament to the work they put in. And then we did a bad job of forcing them off the line. You take that combination, and it went very poorly for us.”
Westlake, which fell to 7-8, had a distinct size advantage over Brookside, but the Demons never were able to take advantage. According to Harris, the reason was obvious.
“We just needed to want to play,” he said. “We didn’t want to play. My best players didn’t want to play. It’s as simple as that.”
Westlake scored the first four points of the game and also held an 8-5 lead midway through the opening period. However, with Nolan Waechter hitting two 3-pointers and Ben Montgomery and Jayden Nazario each adding one, the Cardinals went on a 19-4 run that ballooned the lead to 24-12 early in the second quarter.
Then it was time for Barnhart to put on a show. The senior hit three 3-pointers in the second quarter, and his 11 points in the period helped Brookside open a 37-23 halftime lead.
“We were making shots, and it was by a lot of guys,” Coach Larry Babics said. “Lincoln stepped up huge. Mason hit his shots, Brandon, Nolan, they were all solid. They were so much bigger than us, but, luckily, we were able to make them miss enough that we could neutralize their size a little bit.”
Any thoughts of a Westlake comeback were put to rest early in the third quarter, when it was time for Sharpe to dominate play. He single-handedly led a 12-2 Brookside run by scoring six points and then assisting on 3-pointers by Nazario and Mason Waechter, upping the lead to 49-25. His feed to Waechter came after he made two free throws and then made a steal in the backcourt.
The lead got up to 62-35 early in the fourth period before Westlake put on a bit of a surge. The Demons were led in scoring by Jackson Moore with 15 points, Evan Hargett with 14 and Hayden Purdy with 13. Eleven of Purdy’s points came in the final period, as did 10 of Moore’s. The final score was the closest Westlake got to the lead, but Harris saw something positive in the late effort.
“We had some groups at the end of the game that really stepped up,” he said. “We never stopped fighting. I think we were down 30 at one point and we made it 12 at the end of the game. I was really proud of some of those guys for stepping in.”
Brookside, which is now 12-4, travels to face Columbia on Feb. 3 in a key Lorain County League matchup. The Raiders are a loss behind the first-place Cardinals but have played one fewer game.
“(Westlake is) a good basketball team,” Babics said. “I know they didn’t play particularly well tonight, but we’ve seen enough film on them. They’re big, strong kids who can shoot, and they can hurt you inside. They’re physical defensively. It’s a good test for us. All of our non-conference games are to make it hard. That will get us ready.”
Westlake plays at Bay on Feb. 2.
THE SCORE
Brookside 74, Westlake 62