by Nickolas Meinders

PCM’s boys’ basketball team traveled to East Marshall on Feb. 15 to play the West Marshall Trojans. The PCM boys came into the game with high hopes to keep their postseason going after beating Colfax-Mingo in a home game just two days earlier. The Mustangs never lost hope when facing the Trojans and gave it their all through the entire game but ultimately came up a little short and lost 61-58.

The Mustangs came out playing hard and put up 18 points, almost matching the Trojans’ score of 19 in the first quarter.  After the first quarter, the Mustangs kept playing hard but it seemed almost as if the Trojans stepped up their game even more during the second quarter.  During the second quarter, the Trojans were sinking many deep threes and pushed their total for the first half to 39 and allowed the Mustangs to only tack on nine more points during the second quarter, making the score 39-27 at the half.

PCM started to bounce back in the third quarter and added 15 more points to their total and held West Marshall to only scoring nine. The fourth quarter came around, and the Mustangs kept trying to battle back to keep their postseason hopes alive.

Senior Elijah Sperfslage said, “We played really hard; they just made a ton of shots and it made it really hard for us to guard them.”

That was the story of the night, the Trojans were draining deep shots from a variety of players  and made it nearly impossible for the Mustangs to stay in front of them. They kept battling but eventually fell three points short and unfortunately ending the Mustangs’ 2017-18 season.