Koa Davison banged away inside for six points Friday and helped trigger a stifling defense as Coupeville’s JV rolled to a big win. (John Fisken photo)
Now that’s called flipping the switch.
Shrugging off a first quarter in which it largely stunk up the joint, the Coupeville High School JV boys’ basketball squad suddenly found its groove Friday night and blew visiting Sultan off the court.
Roaring back from an 11-point deficit, the young Wolves combined a stifling defense with an aggressive, three-ball-happy offense and throttled the Turks 49-41 in a game that speaks well for the future.
The win evens the CHS young guns record at 1-1 heading into the start of 1A Olympic League play.
It was truly a tale of two halves — with the first one being seven minutes of agony and the second being 25 minutes of bliss.
Despite an early trey from Mason Grove, the Wolves stumbled badly out of the gate, giving up 12 straight points on a series of barely-contested buckets en route to trailing 16-5.
At which point CHS coach Dustin Van Velkinburgh unleashed the beasts.
Employing a nasty full-court press that frustrated, befuddled and terrorized the Turks, Coupeville turned the tide in a hurry.
Suddenly the Wolves were on the run, the ball was zipping from player to player and everyone was hitting nothing but net.
Meanwhile the Turks were getting dangerously close to crying, as they could barely get the ball up-court against a stifling, opportunistic defense.
Once the flow changed, the Wolves rode the wicked hot shooting touch of Jered Brown and Sean Toomey-Stout, who combined for 17 points during a game-busting 22-4 run.
The few times the duo didn’t put the ball in the hoop, their teammates did, with Kyle Rockwell knocking down a perfectly-angled bank shot and Grove hitting one of his three treys.
Coupeville’s run continued well into the third, with Grove hitting for seven in the quarter, while Koa Davison and Jacobi Pacquette-Pilgrim added buckets while doing the dirty work in the paint.
Up by 17, the Wolves took a breather, let Sultan crawl back to within seven, then emphatically slammed the door shut on the Turks.
Davison hit back-to-back baskets, packaged around a virtuoso bucket from Brown, on which he sucked the entire defense out to the top of the key, then slashed right through the group without being touched.
Coupeville spread its offense around, with Brown hitting for a game-high 16, while Grove notched 13.
Toomey-Stout added nine points (while snatching 12 rebounds and pilfering four steals), with Davison (6), Rockwell (3) and Pacquette-Pilgrim (2) also etching their names in the book.
Ulrik Wells, Tucker Hall, Aram Leyva, Dawson Houston, Aiden Juras, Elliott Johnson and Nikolai Lyngra also saw playing time.
The ever-growing Wells was a force on the boards while Lyngra all but ripped one Turk’s head clean off his shoulders during a scrap for a loose ball.
