The Pella Christian basketball teams had their second doubleheader in as many nights when they traveled to take on Grinnell Tuesday evening. It was the Tigers coming away with a sweep on the evening, as the Pella Christian girls fell 57-35, while the boys dropped a 74-72 decision.
The Eagles girls fell behind 20-9 after the first, but held Grinnell scoreless in the second until 1:40 until halftime. In that span, Pella Christian got the deficit down to five, but would get no closer as Grinnell scored nine quick points to go up 29-20 at the half. After after the teams traded blows in the third, the Tigers took control of the game in the fourth and sealed the win.
Allison Van Gorp led the Eagles with 16 points and six rebounds, and Pella Christian saw scoring contributions from eight of the nine players that saw action. Pella Christian drops to 2-16 overall and 1-10 in the Little Hawkeye Conference.
A slow started plagued the Pella Christian boys, as Grinnell built up a 20-7 lead after one. Despite an uptick on the offensive end in the second quarter by the Eagles, Grinnell extended their lead to 38-22 at the half. Pella Christian trailed by as many as 20 before mounting a major comeback effort. The Eagles slowly chipped away at the deficit, and exploded for 31 points in the fourth quarter. After bringing the deficit down to one in the final minute, Pella Christian had a chance to tie or win in the final seconds trailing 74-72. A missed desperation three by Dan Jungling led to a few minutes of deliberation among the officials and head coaches, as a game clock malfunction caused a long delay. After much debate, it was determined that time had run out, and the game came to a close. While Head Coach Larry Hessing was proud of his team’s resiliency in the comeback effort, it was too large of a deficit to dig out of.
“I think we kind of rediscovered ourselves there the last quarter and a half. We really started getting after it, and that was good to see. Unfortunately we had dug ourselves a huge hole, and we wanted to get going a little bit tonight, so we came out with some extended defenses, and to Grinnell’s credit, they did a good job of handling it and got us down early, and we just struggled for a while. I thought we got better as the game went along, and it’s too bad for us that we didn’t pull it out, but we dug ourselves too big a hole.”
Josh Van Gorp led the way with 18 points while Jungling tacked on 17. Pella Christian falls to 9-8 overall and 4-7 in the conference. Both teams will be back in action Friday at Dallas Center-Grimes.