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Glenbrook South disposes of Prospect

Wide open shots were passed up.

For even more wide open shots.

That's how the Glenbrook South boys basketball team rolls.

"That's the only way we're going to win," Glenbrook South coach Phil Ralston said. "We run a lot of sets and we want our kids to be very disciplined. We are very selective in the types of shots we want to be taking and our kids have bought into playing that brand of basketball."

Moving the ball with laserlike precision, the uber unselfish Titans rolled up 17 assists on 24 made baskets on Thursday to pick apart Prospect 68-39 on the second day of the Wheeling Wildcat Hardwood Classic.

The crisp passing led to a bundle of high percentage shots in the paint and Glenbrook South, which averages about 16 assists per game, finished with a scorching 60 percent shooting clip from the field.

The Titans, who got a game-high 32 points out of 6-foot-4 junior forward Dom Martinelli, will now face Fremd at 7:15 p.m. on Friday in the tournament semifinal.

Glenbrook South, which also got 10 big assists from senior guard Will King, is now 11-2 on the season.

"We're all such great friends on this team that we just share the basketball so well," said Martinelli, who was 2 points off his career high of 34 points. He has played on the varsity since his freshman year and is getting looks from multiple Division I programs, including most recently Brown. "We've preached all year that we want to be the unselfish team that we are. Passing the ball is what our coach really wants us to do to get the best look and it really shows in games like these why we are so successful. It's because of those extra passes."

Martinelli was the beneficiary of a lot of those extra passes. With a knack for finding the open cut at just the right time, he got one high percentage shot in the lane after another. He connected on 11-of-13 shot attempts, and was 1-for-1 from 3-point range. On Wednesday against Taft, he was 11-of-14 from the field.

"Dom is an unbelievable athlete," Ralston said. "He might not look it (at a wiry 6-foot-4), but he runs the floor, he does a lot of the little things. He finds good position, he times his jumps right. But it's the ability to finish. It's an old-school thing of putting your body between you and the basket and shooting the ball using your body as a barrier, so he's able to score on kids who are bigger than him.

"We knew he was going to have a good game. The first play of the game, we got him a wide-open layup."

Glenbrook South got out to a 12-5 lead early in the first quarter but Prospect closed the gap to 4 points (16-12) by the end of the period. Then the Titans went on a 15-0 run to start the second quarter to really seize control. That gave Glenbrook South a 31-12 lead with 2:49 to go before halftime.

"Glenbrook South has so much misdirection and they move the ball so well that if one guy falls asleep, you're dead. And that happened to us a lot tonight," Prospect coach John Camardella said. "We weren't at our best tonight, and they were pretty darn good."

But after a lackluster first half that saw Prospect take just 16 points into the halftime locker room (down 34-16), there was a bit of a reversal of momentum in the third quarter.

Prospect, which drops to 7-6 on the season, outscored Glenbrook South 17-13 in the third quarter, but was still down 47-33 going into the fourth quarter.

"I think we just figured in the third quarter that we might as well go hard now because we have nothing to lose," said Prospect senior forward Jon Kreidler, who was the Knights' only double figure scorer with 14 points. "If we keep that effort going for the rest of our season, I think we'll be OK.

"They (Glenbrook South) are just a really good team, really efficient. We thought we had them (figured out) on the scout with all the passing, but it's different when you come out here and see it. They are very good at moving the ball and being really unselfish as a team. It makes them really tough to guard."

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