McHenry battles back

Cary-Grove’s Zach Taylor (right) zips around McHenry guard Jeff Nicholls on a drive toward the basket in the third quarter Wednesday in Cary. McHenry defeated Cary-Grove, 47-45, in the Fox Valley Conference Valley Division game. (Daniel J. Murphy – dmurphy@shawmedia.com)

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CARY – McHenry senior guard Danny Glick had plenty of time to contemplate what was on the line.

As the clock ticked down in a back-and-forth game tied at 45, Glick prepared to go to the free-throw line with a chance to put McHenry ahead with the Warriors in the bonus. After he was fouled corralling a long rebound, Cary-Grove called a timeout allowing Glick and the Warriors to huddle up.

“Just in practice, our coach always says ‘In late games you have to hit these,’ ” Glick said. “And I just pictured it and just let it go.”

Glick calmly converted both with 11.8 seconds remaining; however, McHenry missed another one-and-one attempt with 6.2 seconds left leaving the door open for C-G.

Despite McHenry’s best efforts to foul the Trojans with one to give, the referees let them play. The Trojans mishandled the ball near the sideline and couldn’t recover it in time to get off a game-winning shot, sealing the Warriors’ 47-45 Fox Valley Conference Valley Division win.

“He had the look in his eye,” McHenry coach Tim Paddock said of Glick. “You can do all you want to in practice to try to simulate that. You can’t simulate those kind of free throws. But he stepped up and hit them and it was a great win.”

The Warriors (6-9, 1-3 FVC Valley) aren’t strangers to close games. In their last game, a road battle at Dundee-Crown, McHenry failed to take advantage of a similar opportunity missing two free throws with 12.4 seconds left and trailing by one in an eventual loss to D-C. Paddock was confident this time that the outcome would be different.

“Most every game in our conference, it’s going to be a two-possession game, and I told them that from the beginning,” Paddock said. “Now a two-possession game doesn’t have to be the last two, but I thought we defended them well, and I thought we guarded them really, really well the whole game.”

McHenry weathered the absence of Robert Tonyan (team-high 13 points) admirably in the first half after the 6-foot-5 senior forward picked up two fouls less than four minutes into the game, forcing him to the bench until midway through the second quarter. Korey Partenheimer’s three pointer – one of seven McHenry made – gave the Warriors their only lead of the first half on the game’s first basket, although C-G’s lead was only 20-17 at the break.

Neither team truly asserted control in the second half, but the Trojans (4-13, 1-2) managed to erase an eight-point third-quarter deficit after three consecutive McHenry three pointers, including two by Glick (eight points).

Eric Graham’s two free throws with 54 seconds left in the fourth put C-G ahead, but it couldn’t fend off McHenry. Jake Bianchi scored a game-high 15 points for C-G.

“It was one of those games where you thought you were on the verge of winning and all of a sudden they block a shot or we have a little turnover or a charging foul, so it could have gone either way,” C-G coach Ralph Schuetzle said. “[Tonyan] was pretty hard to keep off the glass.”