The Packers completed a season sweep of Mankato West and of the week’s games with a 43-35 win in Mankato last night. Tough half-court defense by both teams led to the low-scoring affair, as the score was just 19-15 at halftime.
Joe Aase led the Packers with 18 points, while Andrew Kaiser had 8, Zach Wessels 6, Tom Aase 5 and Jay Ettinger and Zach Fadness each had a timely trey. Here’s the Austin Daily Herald article.
With the win, the Packers are now 12-9 overall and 10-5 in the Big 9 Conference.
The Austin boys avenged an early January loss to Mankato East last night with a 60-51 win over the Cougars.
It was senior night, in a matter of speaking, as Max Coffee, Jay Ettinger, and Andrew Kaiser each scored 9 for the Packers, while Zach Fadness added 8. Joe Aase led the scoring with 14, Zach Wessels had 6 and Tom Aase 5.
Here’s our next voyage in the way-back machine, to March 26, 1981. As we left off, the Packers were down 31-24 at halftime to Minneapolis North, the undefeated defending state champions who were riding a 41-game winning streak.
Unfortunately, I can’t show you the first four minutes of the second half, because during halftime of our game the coverage switched to Williams Arena, where the Class A quarterfinals were being played. I’m confident that on March 4 when we have our 30-year reunion we will hear wildly differing recollections of how we clawed our way back into contention, but as we pick up the action below, we had scored three unanswered buckets (no such thing as a trey in the day) to close the gap to 31-30.
Here’s all the good stuff from the rest of the action, and some shots from the crowd that will bring back memories, too:
Next week we’ll have highlights from the 1981 state semifinals against another undefeated team, Chaska.
We look forward to the reunion of the 1981 team on March 4, which coincides with this year’s Packer team playing its last regular season game against Rochester Century before starting its tournament run.
The Austin Packers’ bid for a sweep of the week fell short when they dropped a 57-47 contest to Rochester Mayo on Friday night.
The Packers led by one at the half, but fell behind with a few minutes gone in the second half and couldn’t catch up. The Mayo coach said it was his team’s best performance of the year.
Joe Aase, Zach Wessels and Tom Aase were all in double figures for the Packers, with 16, 14 and 12 points respectively, while Zach Fadness had 3 and Andrew Kaiser 2.
Here are the video highlights:
The Packers are back in action Tuesday night at home against Mankato East.
The Packers pushed their record to 10-8 Thursday night with a 73-44 win over Waseca.
After a scoreless first couple of minutes, the Packers went on a 9-0 run to start the game and never looked back, leading 41-24 at halftime and pushing the lead to nearly 40 with about 10 minutes remaining. Joe Aase had 25 points to lead the scoring, while Zach Wessels had 15, Matt Duren 11, Andrew Kaiser 9, Tom Aase 6, Zach Fadness 3, Jay Ettinger 2 and Caleb Knorr 2.
Here’s the Austin Daily Herald story (including a nice picture of Joe’s dunk.) And here are the video highlights (the dunk sequence starts around the 2:25 mark):
Tonight the Packers travel to Rochester looking to build on their two-game winning streak (and their four-game winning streak against Rochester schools) in a 7:30 contest against the Mayo Spartans.
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