Dawgs pull away at Farragut

Bearden High School’s boys basketball team kept its perfect record intact Friday night, Dec. 8. But Bulldogs head coach Jeremy Parrott was less than pleased.

“The fact that we’re finding ways to win pleases me, but we’ve still got a long way to go,” Parrott said after Bearden used a huge fourth quarter to pull away and earn a 76-53 District 4-AAA victory over rival Farragut before a near capacity crowd in FHS’s Lynn E. Sexton Gymnasium. “This is a great bunch of kids but we’ve got to start things better.

“Somewhere down the line, somebody’s going to make us pay for these lackadaisical starts. When our backs are up against the wall, we play better for some reason,” he added.

Bearden (12-0 overall, 4-0 in the district after winning) was led by guard Quez Glover with a game-high 26 points. Trent Stephney added 16 for Bearden. Shamarcus Brown had 11. Pember scored seven. Roman Robinson and Justin Ketterl finished with six each.

The Bulldogs led throughout the game but never created much separation until the fourth quarter.

The Admirals (3-6, 1-3 after the loss) pulled to within 44-42 when Caleb Thompson hit a pair of free throws midway through the third stanza.

But the Bulldogs responded with a 10-4 run to take a 54-46 lead heading into the fourth quarter.

“Our coach talked about intensity at halftime and we came out and we stepped it up,” Brown said. “We’ve got to start out playing better defensively.”

“I thought we played really well for about 36 minutes,” Admirals head coach Jon Higgins said. “We played well for three quarters. But two or three times [throughout the game] we lost our minds a little bit.

“We turned the ball over and we made decisions that we don’t usually make,” he added.

Thompson led the Ads in scoring with 12. Chris Dalton added 11. Ethan Sherrill scored 10 and Tre Moreno had nine.