The McWard Family

Magic night in Morrisonville

Feb. 16, 2012 12:01 a.m.

 

On paper, it didn't shape up as anything special Tuesday night in Morrisonville. Tuesday night's MSM Conference boys basketball game between Waverly and the host Mohawks pitted 16-9 Waverly and the 7-19 Mohawks.

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The league race already had been decided. Teams had been seeded for next week's regionals. Morrisonville's Senior Night wouldn't come until Friday against Raymond Lincolnwood.

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Nope, just another mid-February game to check off the regular-season list.

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But by the time the game ended, it was a night Joe McWard never will forget -- and not because his team scored a mild 79-71 upset of the Scotties.

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McWard, a 6-foot-3, 230-pound senior, was averaging 15 points a game before Tuesday. But he scored 14 in the first quarter alone, and he never cooled off the whole night.

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"It was pretty cool," said McWard, who finished with 50 . . . . FIFTY . . . . points. "It was one of those nights where everything was going in."

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McWard's previous single-game high was 32 points. That was also the career high for his older brother, 2004 Morrisonville graduate William McWard. Safe to say, Joe has a slam-dunk for family bragging rights now.

 

"The guys were getting me the ball inside," McWard said. "And if I didn't get the ball, I was cleaning up with rebounds. I had 13, and I think most of them were on the offensive end."

 

McWard said as the game wore on, the Scotties tried several defensive schemes to deny him the ball and/or keep him away

from the basket. Goodness knows Bill Pool tried.

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"Sometimes we had him triple-teamed, and he'd throw the ball up and it would still go in," said Pool, Waverly's head coach.

McWard said he knew he had a pretty impressive scoring night going, but he didn't know how impressive it was until the game ended.

 

"When it was over, somebody said something about 50 points," McWard said.

 

McWard's best sport is probably football. He was one of the top players for Kincaid South Fork's co-op team the past few seasons. But at least for one night, he had a basketball performance surpassed by just one Morrisonville player: Jim Allen, who scored 51 points in a 1975 game.

 

So what will McWard do for an encore against Lincolnwood on Friday?

 

"It's kind of funny; a couple of hours ago in class, a girl said, 'You can get (the school record) the next game,'" McWard said. "I said, 'Well, that's kind of rare.'"

 

But with just a few games left in his high school career, McWard gave himself -- and Morrisonville fans -- a special memory. Maybe it will become one of those "I was there" events like Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point NBA game in 1962 in Hershey, Pa. There were a few thousand people there that night, but you'd think "Wilt The Stilt" played that game in the Rose Bowl given all the people who've claimed to have seen it.

 

Of course, Wilt had about a 9-inch height advantage on McWard, so he'll settle for 50.

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