Sports

Sioux boys fall in region qualifier

By Matthew Semisch

03/03/2015

RUGBY - Westhope-Newburg’s (W-N) boys basketball team saw its season come to a rough end on Monday on the final day of the Class B District 11 tournament.

The tournament had started reasonably well for the Sioux, however, considering they were the bottom seed of the seven teams that made their way to Rugby. W-N put a major scare into second-seeded Towner-Granville-Upham (T-G-U) in the first round on Friday, but an overtime buzzer-beater gave the Titans a hard-fought 59-58 victory.

Senior W-N center Chance Kitzman led the Sioux against T-G-U with a team-high 24 points.

The loss to the Titans meant that W-N needed a victory over No. 3 Velva on Saturday if the Sioux were to keep their season alive. That’s exactly what happened when W-N pulled out a surprise 50-46 victory over the favored Aggies.

“We outlasted a really good Velva team and it wasn’t pretty but it worked,” W-N head coach Bob Beaudrie said, “and we’re still in with a chance to reach our goal of a berth in a region tournament.”

Kitzman was W-N’s leading scorer again on Friday with 12 points.

The Sioux would have advanced to next week’s Region 6 tournament in Minot if they had defeated Sawyer in the teams’ region-qualifier game on Monday night. W-N couldn’t take advantage of 20 Tate Wyman points, however, and fell 69-54 to the Flashes.

W-N (2-20) now loses just one senior in Kitzman.