Abbeville advances thanks to a good second half outting

Call it nerves. Call it overconfidence. Whatever it was, it went away in the second half.
The No. 5 Abbeville Wildcats may have come into their first-round game against No. 28 Bogalusa a little overconfident because, at half time, Abbeville was only ahead 30-27.
That Abbeville team who played in the first half stayed in the locker room and never resurfaced in the second half. Instead, the 2019 Wildcat team, who won 20-plus games, made an appearance in the second half and went on to blowout Bogalusa, 77-63.
In the third period, AHS built up as much as a 20-point lead, something they could not do in the first half.
“I can’t tell you what I told them,” said AHS head coach Berwick Hamilton. “I told them we are not playing the way we are capable of playing. We let them hang around.”
That was not the case in the second half.
Four minutes into the third period, Abbeville led 49-33. They outscored Bogalusa 19-3 and put the game away.
“Coach Hamilton told us at the half, we need to play our game,” said senior Tyrese Sam, who finished with 16 points.
In the first half, Bogalusa led and tied the game twice.
“We thought we had the game won before it started,” said Sam. “We were overconfident.”
In did not take Abbeville long to realize, Bogalusa was not going to be an easy opponent. At the start of the second period, AHS was down 14-13.
In the final seconds of the second period, the Wildcats had a chance to push the lead to seven; Instead, however, they committed a turnover, and Bogalusa made two points and went into the locker room down by only three points.
Abbeville’s Walter Baudoin opened the third period with a 3-pointer that got the crowd into the game, and the blowout began. AHS went on an 11-3 run.
AHS point guard Jurvonta Decuir made an NBA three-pointer, the first of his three in the third period, to give AHS its biggest lead, 11 points, at the time.
“I like what I saw in the second half. We won the game in the third quarter,” said Coach Hamilton. “We put some points up, and we played a better third quarter on defense.”
Decuir would finish with 26 points. He scored 16 of his 26 in the second half.
AHS point guard Tarrius Campbell also got hot in the second half. He scored 13 of his 18 points in the second half.
Davontae Promise added nine for AHS.