By Dom Reed

LEWISTOWN- Saturday the MIfflin County boys basketball team welcomed in the Cedar Cliff Colts on Mini-Thon Night to raise money for Childhood Cancer on Gold Out Night.

Mifflin County drew first blood. Aidan Attivo would hit a two pointer to give Mifflin County a early advantage in front of the home crowd.

Cedar Cliff junior forward Mohamad Ahmed would give the Colts the lead 3-2 on a deep three pointer.

Ahmed would lead the way in scoring for the Colts totaling 16 points.  Three players reached double figures in the game despite losing. Cedar Cliff shot well at times but just got into too much foul trouble and forced numerous offensive turnovers.

“Our focus coming out tonight was to be locked in defensively. We thought we played a much better defensive game than we had in a couple games ago and thats been our focus at practice,” said Mifflin County coach Wade Curry. “Really happy seeing different names on the scoreboard each night. Somebody else that’s stepping up and contributing tonight,Josh Hartzler had a fantastic night scoring 17 for us. You know stepping out and hitting a couple shots from the perimeter and a nice couple of inside. Luke Bender continues to do a nice job creating off his high screen spread offense. And you know we’re rebounding that ball a little bit better than we have.”

The Huskies finished with two players in double digits. Josh Hartzler put up 17 and Luke Bender totaled 15. Bender went 9-for-11 at the foul line in an all around team effort win over the Colts. Hartzler was 2-for-4 at the line in an impressive night for the star studded senior. Jack Curry got into foul trouble early. He would come to the bench he would survive. Curry would not commit another foul in the game with one foul shy of fouling out of the contest.Mifflin County did see Hartzler foul out with 1:10 remaining in regulation. Cedar Cliff saw Aiden Deane,Landon Howell foul out in the game for the Colts.

Evan Strohecker was a big defensive threat in Mifflin County’s win over Cedar Cliff. He was a force to be reckoned with as was so many of his teammates.

“We are trying to use it to fuel going into  the next games. We got a bunch of games next week so we’re trying to use the energy from this one and just keep going forward,” said Husky Josh Hartzler.

Luke Bender said: In the second half we need to fix our defense because we’re not near our coaches on defense.We just need to fix that.

Mifflin County will travel to Palmyra on January 28 to take on the Cougars in hope to make it two straight wins.