Jan 8, 2025
Staff photo / Preston Byers Warren G. Harding’s Myles Miller completes a buzzer-beating layup at the end of the first half during the Raiders’ 71-40 win vs. Howland in Warren on Tuesday.
HARDING — Most boys basketball meetings between rivals Howland and Warren G. Harding are close and competitive. Tuesday’s edition, however, was anything but.
On their home court, the Raiders trounced the Tigers 71-40 behind hot 3-point shooting and a long, active defense.
From the tip, Howland coach Dan Bubon planned for his team to prioritize protecting the paint, hoping to limit the number of high-percentage shots by the larger, more athletic Raiders. But Harding quickly proved why that strategy would not work Tuesday evening.
Seven different Raiders scored in the first quarter, including Xavier Clark, Gummy Hart and Jeremy Sampson, each of whom made a triple in the opening quarter to open up an early double-digit lead.
“For the past three weeks, we’ve been shooting it a ton in practice,” Harding head coach Keelyn Franklin said. “We just got two new Dr. Dishes, so we’ve been putting them to work. So I think that’s kind of a result of the reps that we’ve gotten up, because we made a lot of shots tonight, and I think that was a difference, because they packed that paint on [us].”
While Luca Fronzaglio sank a 3-pointer as the quarter ended to pull Howland back within 10, the rout was on.
Harding soon thereafter widened its lead from 10 points to nearly 30 as multiple Raiders began to catch fire from beyond the arc. Harding made half of a dozen threes in the second quarter, with junior Myles Miller leading the way with three triples.
“He’s 6’6”, he has a high release, it’s tough to kind of get a hand up and frustrate his shot,” Franklin said of Miller. “So when he’s shooting like that and you got Gummy making shots — it almost kind of was contagious tonight.”
By the halftime buzzer, Harding’s advantage had swelled to 29.
During the break, Bubon said he gave an ultimatum to his team.
“The message at halftime and coming into the second half was, either go out there and compete or go home. [That’s] basically what we told them, maybe not that nicely,” Bubon said.
Unfortunately for the Tigers, the second half proved to be only marginally better.
While the Raiders’ hot hands cooled on the offensive end, their hands continued to be an annoyance for Howland, which turned the ball over several times and led to numerous fast-break points for Harding.
Aided by a running clock in the second half as a result of the 30-plus-point lead, Harding dispatched of the Tigers in less than an hour from tip-off, completing the most lopsided result in the rivalry since 2017. The seven previous meetings had been decided by seven or fewer points.
Miller led all scorers with 19 points, while Coleman, a Penn State football commit, added 14. No Howland player reached double figures.
Bubon, who said his team overachieved in non-conference play, hopes the setback serves as a lesson.
“When we tell [our young players] that we need to really get on the weights over the summer and get stronger, this is why. These are the teams we play in our league. And again, we got away early in our non-league — probably a little easier than we should have.
“So this is a good lesson for us. We need to get bigger. We need to get stronger. Little details in practice that we go over that we get away with against some teams, we didn’t get away with tonight, we’re not going to get away with against this team. We’ll only know if we got good lessons out of it over the next two weeks in how we play. I hope we do. You can always learn, win or lose. You can always learn.”
Howland (7-3, 0-1), which had won three straight, will attempt to rebound at Canfield on Friday.
Harding (8-2, 2-0) hosts Sharon on Friday and visits Willoughby South on Saturday before returning to All-American Conference action next week.
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