Greensburg stayed on pace to win the SPIAA League regular season title Friday night with a 48-37 win at Fowler.  The win moved the Rangers to 7-0 in league play heading into Monday night’s match up with South Central, a game that was moved from its original date of December 11 because of a weeklong ice storm.
   With the game tied at 21 at the break, Coach Dave White decided during the intermission to stay with a shift in offensive strategy he’d tried in the waning moments of the second quarter.
   “They were playing us in a match up zone and we were struggling a little with it, so right before the half I switched to a zone offense we’d practiced but hadn’t used this year,” White said.  “It worked well enough I decided to stay with it in the second and it worked out well.  It uses more movement than how we usually attack a zone and gives us more chances for entry passes to the interior.”
   Though he’d intended to play Fowler man, White himself employed a 3-2 zone most of the game when Gold Bug Coach Jim Nelson decided to start all three of his big men at 6-5, 6-4 and 6-3.
   “We made their guards be a factor in the game and they weren’t able to get it to their bigs on the low block much,” White said.
  Able to maintain a four to five-point lead through the first 12 minutes of the second half, Fowler began putting the Rangers on the line once they moved to an eight-point advantage midway through the fourth.  The strategy backfired, however, as GHS hit 10 of 14 free throws in the last quarter, including all six attempted by senior guard Eric White.
   White and David Cesmat led Greensburg scoring with 12 apiece, Andrew Seiler chipping in eight.
   With 6-2 junior forward Shane Engelken likely out the rest of the season with a cracked bone in his foot, Greensburg appeared even more short-handed heading into Coldwater Monday night with Eric White at home in bed with the flu.
   Coach White said he’d likely try 6-4 senior post David Cesmat as the primary defender against Timber Wolf scorer Trae Beck, who tallied 39 at Jetmore last Friday.
    “Beck’s got kind of a flat shot, so with David’s length he might be able to bother his shot a little,” White said.
   And if Cesmat gets into foul trouble, as he’s been wont to do on several occasions in the past?
   “They we’ll try Lane (Allison) on him,” White said.  “Then maybe Logan (Waters) or Jarrett (Schaef).  We’ll probably have to rotate people on him and try to trap him whenever he has the ball.
   “I’ve also noticed he’s going to shoot any time he takes a dribble and then a step to his left.  We practiced defending that Sunday, so hopefully we can hold him down.”
Girls down Fowler again…
   Marshall Ballard’s squad, meanwhile, moved to 9-5 on the season by beating Fowler for the second time in 13 days, 46-42, again being led by double-digit scoring by their senior trio of Lindsey Heft, Kacey Fulton and Megan Booth.
   Though GHS led by six at the break, the score was knotted at 33 all after three, the Lady Rangers rallying for 13 fourth-quarter points while holding the Lady Bugs to only nine.
   “We made some big shots and even bigger free throws down the stretch,” Ballard said later.  “We’d struggled from the line earlier, but Kacey stepped up and hit three of four in the last couple of minutes.  We also got some key defensive stops and then converted those into points on the other end.”
   Asked how key the solid play by his three senior starters has been since the Christmas break, Ballard didn’t understate the trio’s role.
   “I feel like our seniors have started to take charge of the games and really step up when we need them,” he said.  “I can’t say enough about the senior leadership on this team.  They’ve been positive examples and leaders on and off the court this year, and I think that has been a huge part of the success we’re having.”
   Like his coaching counterpart on the boys’ side, however, Ballard was likely facing Monday’s trip to Coldwater without one of those seniors, Megan Booth, who’s recently been bitten by the same flu bug making the rounds at GHS.
   Greensburg travels to Ashland Tuesday night, before a trip to Macksville Saturday to make up a December 14 game that was postponed due to ice.