FARMINGDALE — Having reached the 1,000-career point milestone, Jacob Hickey’s scoring prowess is well-established.
That Winthrop’s senior guard finished with a game-high 23 points Thursday night, including one stretch where he scored 10 in a row for the Ramblers in their 68-52 win over Hall-Dale, is concerning for their MVC rivals, but nothing new.
That Winthrop already had an eight-point lead and had the top-ranked team in the Class C South Heal points on the ropes before Hickey even got into the scoring column is new, however, and should be very troubling for anyone who might cross the Ramblers’ path this year.
Garrett Tsouprake and Cam Wood turned the paint into their own personal playground to send the Ramblers out to a 20-8 lead that Hall-Dale could never recover from as the unbeaten Ramblers cruised to a 16-point win at Penny Gym.
“We have a lot of size to use to our advantage,” Wood said. “We want to get the ball down low, feed the bigs, and work it in.”
Despite being in foul trouble for most of the game, the 6-foot-4 Tsouprake, a senior, finished with 18 points and 12 rebounds. Wood, a 6-8 sophomore, added 15 points and seven boards for the Ramblers (7-0).
“Me and Cam, we know we need to by physical down there,” Tsouprake said. “But it really comes down to execution, I think. We knew this was a good team coming into it. We prepared all week for them.”
“That’s huge for us,” Winthrop coach Todd MacArthur said. “As much attention as Jake garners on the outside, that opens up the inside. A team has to make a decision: are we going to double down and leave him on the outside to knock down some shots, or are we going to leave the post in single coverage?”
Hall-Dale (6-2) chose the latter from the start, and Tsouprake and Wood made the Bulldogs pay by working the high-low game to perfection. The duo scored the first eight points of the game and the Ramblers’ first 12, all in the paint.
“We got things established last season with the high-low,” Tsouprake said. “I think it’s gotten nothing but better ever since.”
“We wanted to come out and establish the advantages we had,” MacArthur said. “We definitely utilized our size and tried to ride the wave for the rest of the game.”
It took Hickey some time to get on his scoring surf board, though he found other ways to contribute from the get-go (seven rebounds, six assists, two steals). His defense led to his first points, a layup off a steal that ended up being a three-point play that gave the Ramblers a 15-4 lead.
That was the start of Hickey’s 10-point run, which carried over into the second quarter and kept Winthrop’s cushion around the 11-point mark, even while the Bulldogs, who shot just 4-for-14 in the first quarter, started to get a little more going offensively.
“We got hit with a left cross in the first quarter, then it felt like kind of an even game,” Hall-Dale coach Chris Ranslow said. “But we never recovered from the 12-point deficit.”
With Tsouprake on the bench due to foul trouble, Winthrop went back inside to Wood and also got hoops from sophomore reserves Jared McLaughlin and Nate LeBlanc to lead 35-23 at halftime.
Tsouprake started the second half with a jump hook and Wood converted off a feed from Hickey to widen the margin to 16. Back-to-back layups by Tsouprake extended it to 20 midway through the third.
“It’s hard to take away everything. I thought we did a good job containing Hickey in the first half, to some extent,” Ranslow said. “You can’t give layups up, and we weren’t winning the one-on-one battles on the block. We weren’t physical enough.”
Alec Byron led the Bulldogs with 16 points, while Jett Boyer added 14.
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