With the regular season coming closer to an end, the Westside boys basketball team had a roller coaster weekend. After taking down Millard West the week before, the Warriors jumped up to fifth in the Omaha World-Herald Rankings, their highest ranking of the season. In their Friday night matchup, the Warriors would take on the fourth-ranked Omaha Central Eagles. Coming off three huge wins the week before, Westside looked to continue their momentum up against one of their toughest opponents on the season.

The team would start the game off strong with high energy to showcase their young talent, up by as much as 14 in the second quarter and ten at half. Junior Reggie Thomas collected 16 of those points by half-time in another strong showing. After a fast start to the second half, the stairs began to crumble in the fourth quarter as Central would slowly take the lead away. With just under three minutes to go, Central would take the lead for the first time of the evening. They would hold that lead as the Warriors would fall short.

“Everybody wasn’t locked in, everyone was playing selfish and we were not together. We were not our H-U-R-A,” Thomas said. “We gotta play together and play focused. Today was a bad day but tomorrow will be better.”

This is not the first time the Warriors would lose in the last minutes of the game. Up against top-five teams this season, the Warriors have blown substantial leads in their losses to Prep and Millard North. Although the team has gradually improved upon this, there’s still work to be done before districts.

“We gotta finish games, everytime we played a top ten team we never finished the whole game, we would only play for one to two quarters,” Thomas said. 

Not only would this game break Westside’s winning streak but would set them back from securing a district host. Head coach Jim Simons wasn’t impressed with the performance either.

“ I thought we did not do many of the things we did in the first half, I thought we played better together in the first half, and were more patient offensively. I thought our shot selection was not as good as it needed to be in the second half. Defensively we communicated very well and gave them some troubles to start off,” Simons said. “Obviously, in the fourth quarter they had 22 points, which is significantly more than any of the other quarters they played. Tale of two halves. They did some stuff they didn’t like in the first half, and we did stuff we didn’t like in the second half.”

The Warriors’ then played Lincoln East and cruised past the Spartans 76-44. The team had a pair of standout performances from junior Chandler Meeks who had 18 points, and junior Payson Gillespie who scored 17 points and was 3 for 3 from beyond the arch. And lastly, junior Charlie Davis had 12 points and was 4 for 5 from beyond the arch.  

“In the second half, I think we could have done a better job trusting each other and being smarter with our shot selection, better job of taking care of the ball. Especially in the fourth quarter when they went on a big run, we weren’t good at trusting each other in our offense. As we refocused on the Lincoln East game we had to have a good bounce-back game because Lincoln East had some good games and they are a solid team to play. With the two pretty good offensively talented players, they had a great win against number four Pius X so we knew that they could make it a game if we didn’t step up and be resilient. Especially since we are trying to get home court for districts,” junior Logan Wilson said.

The Warriors now look to get ready for their game against Gretna. The game will be played Friday, February 19, at 7:15pm.