St. Pauls Middle’s Tyson Thompson, left, puts up a shot over several Lumberton Junior High defenders during Tuesday’s county middle school championship in Pembroke.
Chris Stiles | The Robesonian
St. Pauls Middle’s Malachi Locklear (12) looks to shoot as Lumberton Junior High’s Christopher Hammonds (14) defends during Tuesday’s county middle school championship in Pembroke.
Chris Stiles | The Robesonian
Lumberton Junior High’s Amare Jones (5) puts up a shot over several St. Pauls Middle defenders during Tuesday’s county middle school championship in Pembroke.
Chris Stiles | The Robesonian
St. Pauls Middle’s boys basketball team celebrates after defeating Lumberton Junior High in Tuesday’s county middle school championship in Pembroke.
Chris Stiles | The Robesonian
PEMBROKE — For one half, the St. Pauls Middle and Lumberton Junior High boys basketball teams looked very even in the county middle school basketball championship Tuesday.
But once the second half started, St. Pauls showed why it deserved to be crowned county champions, and the resulting run made the difference in a 49-38 win.
St. Pauls outscored Lumberton 22-5 in the third quarter, turning a 20-20 halftime tie into a 42-25 lead at the end of the period.
“They weren’t moving to play defense like they usually do in the first half,” St. Pauls coach Waders Burden said. “At halftime we talked about it, made the changes we needed to make, came back out and they executed.”
Tyson Thompson, who led St. Pauls (12-0) with 14 points, eight rebounds and six blocks, and Malachi Locklear, who scored 11 points, each scored six points during the run.
“We just had to play harder,” Thompson said. “We weren’t playing very hard, and we kept shooting 3s and weren’t making them. We started playing defense (in the second half).”
Lumberton (9-2) never got closer than an 11-point deficit in the fourth quarter.
“We stopped playing defense, we started playing individual ball,” Lumberton coach Quincy Johnson said. “We didn’t play our ball that got us here.”
Neither team led by more than three points at any point in the first half; the game was tied 10-10 after the first quarter and 20-20 at intermission.
Amare Jones scored 22 points for Lumberton; Israel Perkins had 20 rebounds and Christopher Hammonds had 10.
St. Pauls got 11 points from Yoshua McBride, who combined with Thompson and Locklear to form a formidable scoring threesome.
“They actually just came together; there’s about two or three of them that’s played ball together but the rest of them just came together,” Burden said. “We’ve got six eighth-graders; they got everybody together and we practice hard, we work hard in the gym.”
The loss ends a streak of four straight county championships for Lumberton Junior, from 2017-20; no county middle school championships were held last school year.
“They’re not like other teams I’ve had in the pass, that were more skilled and athletic; they didn’t have that,” Johnson said. “But they made a good team.”
Chris Stiles can be reached at 910-816-1977 or by email at [email protected]. You can follow him on Twitter at @StilesOnSports.
