With less than two seconds remaining Thursday in the Commanding General’s Unit Level Basketball Tournament championship at Smith Fitness Center, Antwain McClain of the Maneuver Center of Excellence let the ball go from the left corner of the court. If he hits the shot, MCoE wins. A miss, and it’s second place.
When the shot hit the rim, bounced off and was rebounded by MEDDAC, coach James Johnson breathed a sigh of relief as it held on to beat MCoE 38-37 for the championship.
“I was thinking, “Here we go again,’” Johnson said about the final shot. “2/29 did that to us last year when we were in the championship game during the preseason. They hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to win the game. It didn’t work out that way (this time), and I’m happy to get the win.”
In the first non-Commander’s Cup double-elimination basketball tournament held by the Directorate of Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation, MEDDAC easily disposed of its first- and second-round opponents by a combined score of 110-67 before meeting MCoE in the third game of the winner’s bracket. MCoE won that game 43-40, sending MEDDAC to the loser’s bracket, where it defeated 75th Ranger Regiment 46-39 to set up a rematch with MCoE — this time, for the championship.
In Game 1 of the finals, four MEDDAC players hit from the 3-point range and Christopher Thomas contributed a game-high 24 points to lead the club to a 51-47 win. Marquis Elliott led MCoE with 18 points in the loss.
After playing back-to-back games with the final championship game still to play, Johnson reached into his bag of strategies to find a way to compensate for the physical demands of having to play three games in the span of three hours.
“We had been in this position before, so we knew what to expect,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have the legs to go man-to-man, I knew that. So we stayed in the zone a majority of the game, and we just stretched the zone out rather than go man-to-man.
“We knew exactly what had to happen. We expelled the energy we needed to get us to the final game, then we just used everything we had to pull out the win.”
In Game 2, MEDDAC went on an 8-0 run halfway into the first half and carried a 20-15 lead into the break.
Within the first two minutes of the second half, Arthur Staton and Marquis Elliot had MCoE back on top 22-20, but MEDDAC bounced back to lead 24-22 at the 14:33 mark.
With 49 seconds remaining, MEDDAC nursed a two-point lead, but following a foul, MCoE breathed new life with Dionte Clayborn getting a shot to tie the game from the free-throw line.
Clayborn made the first shot to pull MCoE to within a point. He missed the second shot, but caught a break when a teammate got the rebound to give MCoE one more shot at victory. With 17 seconds remaining, MCoE ran the clock to set up one final shot, McClain missed as MEDDAC held on for the win.
“In the second game both teams came out flat,” Johnson said about the low-scoring game. “We could not score at point-blank at the rim. We were missing easy buckets, easy looks, but we managed to pull it out when the time came for us to pull it out. I am proud of these guys … they played a great game. I can’t ask for a better team to coach.”
