Benet defense slows Limestone

If you happened to catch a glimpse of Bartonville Limestone's first-half shooting percentage on Saturday in the opening game of the Batavia Night of Hoops, you might have made the assumption that Benet didn't play particularly well defensively.

That wasn't the case.

From the opening tip, when the Redwings defended a Limestone set for exactly two minutes while limiting the Rockets to one shot, Benet extended possessions and generally held the Peoria-area Limestone squad to one shot while grinding out a 47-42 win. Limestone made 46.1 percent of its shots.

"That's been how we play defense. We play kind of packed in so if teams are patient, sometimes those possessions can be long," Benet coach Gene Heidkamp said. "We would have liked to have played a little bit more uptempo, but they were patient and we aren't going to change our style defensively, and I think that led to what you saw."

With that long initial possession eating up a significant portion of the first quarter, both teams struggled to find a rhythm early offensively, and Limestone led 8-7 at the end of one quarter.

However, in the second quarter Benet found its rhythm offensively for a short time thanks to senior guard Jeff Conrad.

After coming off the bench and hitting a 3-pointer in the first quarter, Conrad started the second and hit a pair from long distance on back-to-back possessions to give Benet a 13-11 lead. For the quarter Benet shot 7 of 11 and took a 26-20 lead to halftime.

"I never know when my name is going to be called, so when I go out there I just have to play my role," Conrad said. "Part of that role is to hit shots."

In the second half Limestone quickly cut the lead to one, but Benet managed to stretch the lead to 5 points or more on several occasions. Yet every time the Redwings seemed primed to pull away, Limestone reined them in thanks to a game-high 20 points from Chris Dixon-Williams.

With 32.2 seconds remaining, Dixon-Williams hit a pair of free throws to reduce the lead to 2, but that was as close as Limestone got.

Benet (16-6) hit on 8 of its 11 free-throw attempts in the fourth quarter to seal the win.

"We weren't scoring a lot of baskets down the stretch, so when they were coming to get us and they fouled we had to be solid from the line," Heidkamp said.