Steineman hits game-winner again

NEW BREMEN - When the game is on the line, there's no doubt who New Bremen wants to have the ball: Scott Steineman.

The senior won last week's game against Fort Recovery with a game-winning buzzer-beater and he worked his magic again on Friday night to help the Cardinals beat Coldwater, 39-38.

The game was tied at 37-all and the clock had ticked under 30 seconds as the Cardinals brought the ball up the court. Steineman found a crack in the Coldwater defense and zipped down the baseline and to the hoop for the lay-in and a 39-37 lead with 21 seconds left to play.

The Cavaliers' Kurt Riethman launched a three-pointer with five seconds remaining to try and win the game for the Cavs, but the shot was off the mark. However, Ryan Geier came up with the offensive rebound and was fouled with just two ticks left on the clock.

Geier made the first free throw, but the second try bounced off the rim and into the hands of Scott Schnelle to secure the Midwest Athletic Conference win for New Bremen.

The Cardinals improved to 5-3 in conference play and 12-7 overall while Coldwater fell to 4-4 in the MAC and 9-9 overall.

"We work on this kind of situation in practice," said Cardinals head coach Mike Ernst. "And he (Steineman) knows he has a lot of freedom to create a shot for himself or someone else. As I said last week, we don't want the ball in anyone else's hands. Win or lose, I can go home and sleep at night if I know that we gave him a chance (to win the game)."

"Our kids did a nice job pressuring them defensively tonight," commented Cavalier head coach Mike Kanney. "They were real aggressive and caused some turnovers. It's just too bad that we couldn't convert and make some more baskets, but it was a good effort by our kids. They (New Bremen) have a lot of good size and we didn't want them to just come down the court and pound it in there to Schnelle, but they had a senior that stepped up there and made some big plays in the fourth quarter."

The Cardinals were able to pull out the victory despite starting the game by hitting only one of their first 10 shots, but were helped by the fact that Coldwater made only one of 15 three-point shots for the game, including 0-for-4 in the fourth quarter.

The Cavaliers were able to stay in the game all night by hitting on their free-throw opportunities. Coldwater went to the charity stripe 25 times and converted on 19 of them. Coldwater fans were left hoping they could have hit just one more.

Steineman paced the Cardinals scoring effort with 20 points, followed by Schnelle with eight, Dan Brown with seven, and Brian Garman with four. Only four New Bremen players found the scoring column.

"We just couldn't seem to string more than two or three baskets together," said Ernst. "We just couldn't stick anything in the basket. Heck, we got a couple of point-blank layups from offensive rebounds and couldn't get them to go either.

"We've had games like this. Some nights we just don't score much and when they did such a great job on Scott Schnelle, holding him to eight points. Scott Steineman had a big night, but we didn't get much after that. We're going to have to get a better balance (offensively) that what we got again tonight."

New Bremen is off until next Friday, traveling to Minster to wrapup the regular season while Coldwater hosts Wapakoneta tonight.