Foul Shooting: Indians Miss Late Free-Throws, Fall to Germantown

With 1.6 seconds left on the clock and Roxborough in a 53-51 hole, the Indians renascent leader Rashawn Anderson toed the foul line and did his best to tune out the cacophonous roar of Germantown boos and the cheers of the 20 or so visiting fans who made the trip.

In a one-and-one situation, the senior steadied himself, dribbled twice, and released. For a moment the gym fell silent, but when the ball clanked off the back of the rim and into the hands of a Bear, the roar—now inverted—resumed. An anticlimactic Germantown foul shot later, and it was over.

"I just missed," Anderson said after the game. "A one-and-one situation like that you have to hit it."

And he didn't.

Germantown High School topped visiting 53-51 on Tuesday in a back-and-forth thriller that saw the Bears make up a nine-point deficit with under five minutes remaining.

The Bears were paced by Tahron Fitzhugh's 18 points, while the Indians also got 18 from Anderson.

Germantown coach Matt Wahl was visibly relieved to have, for the second time this season, slid by a dangerous Roxborough team.

"We definitely don't make things easy on ourselves," he said, before praising his team's resilience. After scoring only nine points the first 12 minutes of the second half, his Bears rallied to score 13 in the game's final four minutes.

"It was all about the fast break-points and the points off turnovers (down the stretch)," the second-year coach said.

The losing coach, Terrell Burnett, concurred with that analysis—to an extent.

"We turned the ball over a lot of times at the end there. You can't do that and win," Burnett said. The Indians coach added that it wasn't the Germantown pressure that swayed the outcome, but his own team's failure to execute.

"We've got plays for (the press)," he said.

Whether the fault was strategy or execution, the result was the same for the Indians: Another loss.

After entering the third period down 31-27, Roxborough clamped down defensively, got some tough and timely offensive rebounds from forward Montrel Thompkins and went on a 21-9 run to take a nine-point lead into the back end of the final period. It wasn't enough.

"We just gave up," Thompkins said after the game. "We didn't work together at the end."

The brilliant play of Germantown's Fitzhugh had something to do with that breakdown.

Every time the Bears needed a play on Tuesday, their captain stepped up and provided it. Fitzhugh got the go-ahead points for Germantown when, with three seconds left in regulation and the score knotted at 51, he took a pass from Woyne McFarland and finished in traffic to give the Bears the lead for the first time since the opening seconds of the period.

The Bears leading scorer gave all the credit to the fans.

"The crowd got us going," he said. "Their hype, their intensity, they carried us."

The Bears improved to 7-8 on the season, while the Indians fell to 5-10.