Tigers to get rematch with Plaquemine Friday

Morgan City High School boys basketball coach Brandon Harden likened No. 29 Morgan City’s Class 4A playoff contest with No. 4 Plaquemine Friday to resetting a PlayStation.
The Tigers, who were defeated 50-29 by the Green Devils in Plaquemine in December while not at full strength, will now get an opportunity to redeem themselves.
“I think what’s kind of cool, too, is we played at Plaquemine and we’re going back to Plaquemine and playing in the same gym,” Harden said Monday. “It’s basically, you get to press the reset button, I guess you could say, like on a PlayStation if you were losing the game. You get to try it all over again.”
This time, the Tigers will get their rematch with sophomore Makye Richard, who has been a scoring threat and a solid ball handler for the team this season, but missed that first contest.
While Richard may not have played in that first game, Harden said, “They beat us fair and square is the way I considered it. Our guys know we weren’t 100 percent that night, and they’re excited to have the opportunity to get to prove themselves as a better ball team than they were that night.”
While Plaquemine sports a 23-6 record and was the district champion of District 6-4A with a 4-0 mark, they do enter Friday’s game trying to get back on the winning track after falling to Class 1A White Castle, 41-37, in their regular season finale. The loss snapped an eight-game winning streak for the Green Devils, whose last loss came to McKinley on Jan. 12.
During their first matchup with Morgan City, Plaquemine’s D.J. Marshall scored 17 points and is an inside threat for the Green Devils.
“They’re a very good ball team, got a big man down low that can cause some problems, and they like to run the floor,” Harden said. “They’re very athletic and got a couple shooters, so that always equals up to a pretty good basketball team.”
Defensively, the Green Devils like to apply pressure on defense.
“They play pressure defense, similar to what Ellender does,” Harden said. “They like to get after it. They like to run the floor. Similar to Ellender.”
This season, the first under Harden, the Tigers have made a drastic turnaround from last year’s 1-23 campaign.
Coming into the season, the Tigers had goals of winning a district championship and returning to the postseason.
While they fell short of the first one, more importantly, they achieved the second with a 16-8 mark and a 6-2 mark in District 7-4A play.
“Proud of our guys this season,” Harden said. “I feel like they really, really worked hard. Practice isn’t exactly the easiest sometimes. Credit to those kids out there, man we pushed them and they worked.”
They come into the playoffs for the first time since the 2012 season when, as a No. 31 seed, the Tigers fell to eventual state runner-up St. Augustine in the first round.
This year’s team enters the postseason having won seven of their last nine games, beginning with a win against Grace King in January.
While the Tigers won that game, their coaches were not happy and they ran following the contest.
“We thought we could’ve won some games throughout the year really and one of the reasons why we were so upset after the Grace King (win) is because we weren’t finishing games. … We lost a couple games in the last two minutes of ball games and that was really a really big issue we felt like we had,” Harden said.
After the Grace King game, the Tigers set their practices from then on to emphasize finishing. While the Tigers played some close contests, they won all except a loss to Class 4A’s No. 13 seed Ellender in Morgan City and a one-point loss to Vandebilt Catholic on the road.
However, earlier in district play, the Tigers defeated Ellender in Houma and they closed the home portion of their season with a win against Vandebilt Catholic.
While Harden anticipates Plaquemine will have improved as well, he said that his team has changed since that first matchup and now have learned how to finish games.
“We had to kind of make some lineup changes here or there, and some guys had to step up,” Harden said. “We’ve kind of challenged some of our upperclassmen and they really stepped up these last three games for us to put us in the playoffs.”
Friday’s game at Plaquemine High will begin at 7 p.m.