Prater scores 18, Bowers adds 17 in win over winless Wabash
BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
Owen Prater Xavier Vance
WABASH — Rochester boys basketball coach Rob Malchow said that the two titles that mean the most to him are “Dad” and “Coach.”
After 17 years of holding the latter title at the only school that he has ever worked, Malchow now ranks No. 1 among Rochester boys basketball coaches in career wins with 231 following a 62-44 win over host Wabash at Coolman Gymnasium Friday.
Owen Prater scored 18 points, and Drew Bowers added 17 for Rochester, who won their seventh straight game and improved to 14-3 overall and 5-2 in the Three Rivers Conference.
Noah Baldwin scored 11 for Wabash, who dropped to 0-19, 0-7.
The teams could meet again at Coolman for Class 2A, Sectional 38 from March 4-8.
Rochester trailed by as many as nine in the second quarter, but they went on a 16-0 spurt – they scored the last eight points of the first half and the first eight points of the second half – to take a 35-27 lead.
Wabash never got closer than six after that, and the lead got as high as 21 in the fourth quarter.
Wabash made seven 3-pointers as compared to Rochester’s two, but Rochester outscored the Apaches 12-1 from the foul line and repeatedly got to the lane with off-the-ball cuts that led to point blank shots at the rim.
After the postgame handshake line, Rochester athletic director Cal Stone, a Wabash grad, handed the game ball to Malchow in a brief ceremony.
Clyde Lyle held the previous wins mark of 230. Lyle coached from 1932-43 and again from 1945-49.
Malchow coached Rochester from 2002-11 and returned after a six-year break in 2017. He invoked the names of Lyle and other former Rochester coaches Jim Powers and Galen Smith when asked about his accomplishment.
“I’m proud that my 301 wins are all at Rochester,” Malchow said, referring to both his boys wins and his 70 wins as the girls coach in the 1990s. “I’ll be honest. That’s special to me. And getting the 231 with the boys is cool, no doubt. The guys that have played for me, the parents that have parented those boys going back to 2002 to 2011 and then again from ‘17-’18 to now, I’ve been blessed. You know, some great players and great coaches have helped me and worked with me.”
Eli Mattern hit a 3-pointer with 3:36 left in the half that preceded the fateful run for Wabash. It gave them a 27-19 lead. They would not score again for the next 7:18.
Bowers found Prater on a back door cut. Xavier Vance caught a post lob and contorted his body to drop a layin over the front of the rim. Bowers fed Vance for another bucket. Then Bowers drove along the right baseline for a banker that tied the game at 27 with one second left in the half.
A Bryce Baugher free throw 15 seconds into the second half put Rochester ahead for good. A Bowers driving layup down the left baseline and a Prater power layup in the post upped the lead to 32-27.
Then came perhaps the game’s weirdest play. Bowers turned down a high ball screen to his right and went left instead. About 12 feet away from the basket, the ball slipped out of his hands and hit the underside of the rim. Bowers grabbed the unusual “rebound” and put it back in and was fouled and hit the free throw to complete a 3-point play.
Meanwhile, Wabash’s scoring drought occurred as the Zebras switched from a 1-2-2 halfcourt trap at the start to a man-to-man in the second half.
“What we were nervous about with our team was their extended 1-2-2 back to the halfcourt took out some length,” Wabash coach Paul Wright said. “So we’ve been working on that, and I think it showed in the first half. Our kids did a great job executing. We wanted them to get us to play man. So when they went man, I’m like, all right, here we go. One thing we’ve done a really good job at since the (Wabash) County tourney was better ball movement, just playing with more confidence against the man. And tonight, for some reason, the ball started sticking. We started standing. So I’ve got to give them credit. They went to something we thought we were pretty good at going against, but we didn’t execute. We were standing, and they’re a good team. Good teams, they never panic, and they just took advantage of our turnovers, and they went down and scored.”
Rochester went on another 13-0 run covering the third and fourth quarters that stretched the lead to 52-32.
The run included a Prater jumper off a curl, a Jack Reffett trey from the right corner with nine seconds left in the third quarter, two Prater free throws, a Bryce Baugher pullup 12-footer, a Prater scoop layup off a Bowers pass in transition and two Baugher free throws.
Prater’s 18 points tied a season high. He also had 18 in a 52-48 win over Bremen on Jan. 4. His career high of 23 also came against Wabash last year.
“They were huge,” Prater said of the last three minutes of the first half. “I think it was just kind of realizing that we need to step on it. They came out playing hard. They haven’t won a game yet, so we knew they were going to come out and play hard, and they did, and we were lackluster, but we came out and we just played harder.”
Said Wright of Prater, referring to him by uniform number: “Twenty hurt us last year. I’m glad he’s a senior because he killed us again.”
Brady Coleman scored his first varsity point on a free throw with 41.3 seconds left.
The halfcourt trap forced eight Apache turnovers in the first quarter as Rochester jumped out to a 9-3 lead. But led by Baldwin’s seven points, Wabash led 15-12.
An air ball putback from McWhirt and a Cooper Long 3-pointer at the outset of the second quarter made it an eight-point lead.
Bowers put back his own miss, but Baldwin hit another 3 to make it 23-14.
“They did a good job preparing for our pressure,” Malchow said. “Our guys rotated a little slow tonight. … Just like tonight, ‘X’ (Vance) comes in and really had a big role for us tonight. And just a credit to him, he’s hanging in there and working every day. He had a little spark for us tonight. It seems like there’s always somebody who comes in off the bench and gives us a spark, or it’s a certain defense that gives us a lift.”
Malchow noted that despite their season-long losing streak, Wabash had played many opponents closely.
“We knew that,” Malchow said. “They took Northwestern to overtime. Their scores are close. They’re right there. I’ll be honest: In the middle of the second quarter, I’m like, OK, maybe we’re going to be number one. I don’t know. Fortunately, we got it turned around.”
Rochester also won the JV game 53-31.
Rochester 62, Wabash 44
ROCHESTER (62) (14-3, 5-2)
Drew Bowers 7 3-4 17, Carson Paulik 1 0-0 3, Bryce Baugher 1 3-4 5, Owen Prater 8 2-2 18, Tanner Reinartz 1 1-2 3, Mitchell Clark 0 0-2 0, Brady Coleman 0 1-2 1, Conner Dunfee 0 0-0 0, Jonas Kiser 3 2-3 8, Grant Clark 0 0-0 0, Jack Reffett 1 0-0 3, Xavier Vance 2 0-0 4
TEAM: 24 12-19 62
WABASH (44) (0-19, 0-7)
Jarrett McWhirt 4 0-0 8, Eli Mattern 2 0-0 5, DaVon Osborn 2 0-1 4, Noah Baldwin 4 1-2 11, Cooper Long 1 0-0 3, Ty Carpenter 1 0-0 3, Derek Reed 3 0-0 8, Gage Schiebel-Simon 0 0-0 0, Dominic Baker 0 0-0 0, Landon Hubbard 1 0-0 2
TEAM: 18 1-3 44
Three-point field goals:
Rochester 2 (Paulik, Reffett),
Wabash 7 (Baldwin 2, Reed 2, Mattern, Long, Carpenter)
Total fouls: Rochester 12, Wabash 12
Turnovers: Rochester 12, Wabash 20
Score by quarters
Rochester 12 15 17 18 – 62
Wabash 15 12 5 12 – 44
JV: Rochester 53, Wabash 31
Comments