By Noah Dalton
MITCHELL — After falling to West Washington during the annual Cement City Classic earlier this season, Mitchell High School had a chance on Friday to avenge that loss with a rematch against the Senators.
The first time around, it was a convincing win for West Washington, 55-32 final, with a strong second half, where they outscored the Bluejackets 37-14 making the difference.
In the rematch, the Senators eventually were the victors once again, this time with a final score of 61-45.
Once again, West Washington swung the game during the second half. This time it was specifically the fourth quarter, where they began the period scoring nine unanswered points before ultimately outscoring Mitchell by 19 points (27-8).
Until that point, the two sides had spent much of the night exchanging small leads back and forth, with the Bluejackets going up by six points near the end of the third quarter, the largest lead either side held before the Senators took control in the fourth.
Mitchell head coach Clint Roesler specifically pointed to turnovers as a reason for the team’s fourth quarter slide. The Bluejackets gave it up eight times in the fourth quarter, more than the seven they’d lost in the previous three quarters combined.
“The ball pressure bothered us too much. Simple turnovers that we don’t need to make and simple things that we need to do better. We just couldn’t execute it well enough tonight,” he said.
“We talked about in the locker room, that everybody in our program has got to go home tonight and nobody should point fingers at each other, but they should point back, including myself and the coaching staff and everybody that’s involved in our program, and figure out what do we need to do a little bit better.”
Despite the loss, the second time around against West Washington was a much stronger showing from the Bluejackets, particularly on the offensive end.
The 32 points total scored by Mitchell in that game was the team’s lowest since the 2023-24 season where they scored only 29 against Scottsburg, who went on to win the Indiana 3A State Championship that season.
“We looked at ourselves, we looked at a lot of film.
I think we still had a little bit of a hangover from the night before losing an emotional game that we should have won. So that didn’t help either. We had some tired legs, we didn’t shoot the ball very well,” Roesler said about the team’s first matchup against the Senators.
“I had three main areas that we needed to focus on, and that was rebounding, turnovers and finishing at the rim better. We pulled clips from everybody from all three of those days and watched it and watched what we needed to do better. For three quarters, we did a really good job of that,” he said about the team’s improvement in Friday night’s game.
Gavin Robinson was the Bluejackets’ leading scorer for the night with 23 points. He finished the game just one point shy of reaching 1,000 for his career.
Robinson will likely cross the milestone during the team’s next game, Jan. 27 against Medora at The Hive.
“If you were able to score 1,000 points in this state, you accomplished something major and I don’t know that he’s fully understood that yet. I think it’ll be a thing when he gets older that he can look back at it and see how special it is. He’ll really appreciate it. Right now, he’s just like, ‘all right, cool.’ But, man, that’s just Gavin,” said Roesler.
“I love Gavin. I love how hard he plays. And I’m really proud of him. He’s shouldered a load this year and from the team that he had last year, which was a bunch of experienced players, versus this team. He’s handled it with grace and respect.”
