Kevin Komstadius just kept getting knocked down, and he responded in a
most efficient manner. He just kept knocking shots down.
The East Valley sophomore scored 14 of his 23 points in the second half,
snared the game’s most important rebound and then sank the clinching
free throws in the Red Devils’ 45-40 first-round victory over a gritty
Riverside squad that simply would not go away.
East Valley's Kevin Komstadius
shoots
over Riverside's Jason Paul during
Wednesday's first-round game.
“They played us tough through the whole game. They played hard,”
Komstadius said of the Rams, who managed to stay in the game despite
their own grisly 29.4 percent shooting (15 for 51). “They were a great
team. They played us tough.”
And tough, also, was the 6-foot-4 but wiry Komstadius, who couldn’t seem
to get a foul call when he would take the ball to the hole and encounter
collisions with one or more defenders — several times ending up on his
back. He never shied away, and neither did junior guard Mikael Rojas,
who picked up four of his six assists on slick dishes inside to
Komstadius.
“You gotta play through it,” Komstadius said. “The refs can’t dictate
how you play. You just have to keep your head in it and play your game.”
And Rojas knew he would. “We have trust in each other. That’s a
cornerstone for our team — we trust each other,” he said. “It was pretty
tough. They’ve got a Division-1 football player (Adam Anderson, bound
for the University of Idaho) and quite a bit of height.”
Anderson scored a team-high 13 points, while the Rams’ most effective
player was 6-3 center Jason Paul, who pulled down 17 rebounds to help
Riverside dominate the boards. The Rams’ rebounding advantage nearly
overcame their shooting woes, and only when East Valley put together a
10-5 run late in the game — including eight points by Komstadius — did
the Devils push their lead as big as seven.
But the Rams (15-10) still weren’t through. The Devils (15-9) missed the
front end of three one-and-ones and, after three-pointers by Cody Jensen
and Anderson — the latter with 13 seconds remaining — Riverside trailed
just 43-40.
And when East Valley’s Craig Harris missed two free throws with 7.9
ticks remaining, the Rams figured to have one more chance.
Nope. Komstadius flew across the lane, grabbed the rebound, was fouled
and coolly sank two free throws to clinch the victory.
“He’s just a real competitive kid,” East Valley coach Steve Elder said
of Komstadius, who finished with a team-high eight rebounds and played
all 32 minutes. “We’re proud of our kids that they played through
everything. We got some big minutes out of Bobby Pottenger (after Harris
picked up three fouls in the first 5 1/2 minutes).
“You’ve got to give those (Riverside) guys a lot of credit. They got us
out of what we wanted to do.”
Except for the one thing the Red Devils, who will face Vashon Island in
a quarterfinal Thursday at 9, most wanted to do: win.
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