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Springfield stuns BBE for Class 1A title

By Jim Paulsen, Star Tribune, 03/26/11, 2:30PM CDT

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Tigers win first state championship


Springfield celebrates its Class 1A championship. /Bruce Bisping, Star Tribune

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. A season of perfection, of making big shots and getting big stops, was supposed to end in a state championship.

That was the script, anyway. A script the Springfield Tigers obviously had not read.

The Tigers withstood everything Belgrade-Brooten-Elrosa — the last team left in Minnesota that had not experienced defeat — could offer and didn’t back down, pulling off the mild upset with a 70-58 victory in the Class 1A championship game.

“They are a great team,” said Springfield guard Jesse Kieper, who led the Tigers with 25 points. “But I don’t think they’ve played a team like us.”

After getting blitzed on the offensive boards in the opening minutes of the game, Springfield inserted 6-8, 280-pound senior Tyler Marz in an attempt to control the lane and force Belgrade-Brooten-Elrosa to hit shots from outside.

The change in strategy made all the difference in the world. BBE made only 27 of 80 shots from the field and only two of 27 three-point attempts — none until Brent Koehler made one with 3:08 left in the game.

“We were getting killed on the boards,” Springfield coach Lance Larson said. “I told the kids at halftime that if we didn’t give them 14 offensive rebounds in the first half, we would have been leading by 10 points.”

Still, despite being outrebounded 23-13 at halftime, the Tigers held a one-point lead, 27-26, at the break.

They extended that lead by scoring the first six points of the second half, but BBE responded with a 10-0 run and regained the lead 36-33.

It was the last lead the Jaguars (32-1) would hold. Springfield (26-3) countered with an 8-0 run of its own, thanks to the inside presence of Marz and five consecutive misses from outside by BBE.

“A few teams have tried to do that to us this year,” BBE coach Dave Montbriand said. “But our outside shooters have always been able to knock down shots. We had a lot of real good looks, but we just didn’t make them.”

Fatigue was also becoming a factor. The smaller, quicker Tigers — outside of Marz, that is — were pressing the issue. As BBE continued to send everyone to the offensive glass, Springfield and guards Kieper, Alex Fink and Dillon Schultz was finding more room to operate. Combined, the three of them scored 55 of the Tigers’ 70 points.

“You could tell they were wearing down,” Marz said.

It was something that Springfield had seen before.

“We never start quickly,” Larson said. “We feel the other team out and see how things are. But in the second half, we usually put up some pretty big numbers.”

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