Ryan Murken

Your Prep Sports

CEDAR RAPIDS – West High and Cedar Rapids Prairie both ended the regular season as Mississippi Valley Conference championships.

The Hawks were the only ones celebrating following Saturday’s regular season finale.

Keegan and Kris Murray combined for 44 points as Class 4A eighth-ranked Prairie earned a share of the MVC Mississippi Division title with a 62-54 win over fourth-ranked West High on Saturday afternoon in Cedar Rapids.

The win was the ninth straight for Prairie (16-3) while Valley Division champ West High dropped to 15-4 with its first MVC loss since January 11.

“We played a tough schedule, we played all the good teams on the road and that’s where all our losses came,” West High coach Steve Bergman said. “They are a good team.”

Prairie used a 14-3 second-quarter run to take control and never let West High get closer than five points the rest of the way.

The Murrays scored all but two points during the critical run started with a pair of free throws by Keegan Murray after West High junior Even Brauns was called for a technical foul with 2:59 left in the first half.

Brauns gave West High a 24-23 lead with a bucket in the paint and got tangled up with Prairie junior Max Lampe on his way back up the court leading to the technical.

Keegan Murray hit both technical free throws and Kris Murray converted a conventional 3-point play on the ensuing Prairie possession to turn a 24-23 West High lead into a 28-24 deficit.

“We had our chances,” Bergman said. “The technical foul was a five-point possession and you can’t do that.”

A Jacob Klein 3-pointer cut the lead to 30-27 but the Murray brothers scored the next seven points and Prairie led 37-30 at the half.

The Murrays combined for 19 of the Hawks’ 25 second-quarter points and had 15 of Prairie’s 22 field goals.

Kris Murray had a game-high 26 points while Keegan had 18. 

“They are a team that I would love to have a couple days to prepare for and we didn’t have that,” Bergman said. “We were playing kind of a weird defense, it was man-to-man but we were really helping off some guys but we did it really inefficiently.”

West High got as close as 55-50 on Nick Pepin bucket with 1:56 left but Kris Murray scored 12 seconds later and Prairie hit five of six free throws in the final minute to secure the win.

“We played three games this week and it caught up to us a little bit,” Bergman said. “That’s the way it is, we didn’t do a good enough job and we lost. Our guys aren’t making excuses they know they have to get better.”

Klein and Patrick McCaffery each had 12 points while Brauns and Marcus Morgan each had 11 for the Trojans.

The loss snapped a three-game winning streak for West High and was the third game in five days for West High which defeated Dubuque Wahlert on Tuesday and Western Dubuque on Thursday.

West High will open postseason play on Friday when it hosts the winner of Ottumwa and Davenport West in a 4A Substate 6 semifinal on Friday.

“We are just tired, I’ve got some guys playing a lot of minutes and we didn’t have a lot of energy today,” Bergman said. “We need the break, we need to practice.

West High      14  16   7  17  –  54

CR Prairie      12  25  10 15  –  62

West High (54) – Jacob Klein 3-4 3-3 12, Brayden Adcock 0-2 0-0 0, Joey Goodman 0-1 0-0 0, Nick Pepin 3-5 0-0 8, Marcus Morgan 4-8 1-2 11, Patrick McCaffery 4-14 4-4 12, Even Brauns 5-8 1-2 11, Totals 19-42 9-11 54.

CR Prairie (62) – Keegan Murray 6-14 4-4 18, Kris Murray 9-15 7-9 26, Logan Burg 0-5 1-3 1, Harrison Cook 3-8 0-1 6, Garrett Pientok 1-4 0-0 2, Maxwell Lampe 1-2 2-2 4, Gabe Burkle 2-5 1-1 5, Totals 22-53 15-20 62.

3-point field goals – ICW 7-15 (Klein 3-4, Adcock 0-2, Goodman 0-1, Pepin 2-3, Morgan 2-5), CRP 3-13 (Ke. Murray 2-5, Kr. Murray 1-5, Burg 0-1, Pientok 0-1, Lampe 0-1). Rebounds – ICW 22 (McCaffery 5), CRP 34 (Kr. Murray 8). Turnovers – ICW 11, CRP 9. Total fouls – ICW 15, CRP 12. Fouled out – None. Technical fouls – ICW (Brauns).

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