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The Odessa Ducks ended the regular season with a win over the Howard Wildcats led by one of their top seniors on senior night. Jaylen Bernikow was one of the seven senior basketball players honored on Senior Night as they were set to face off with Howard. It was then Bernikow who helped lead the Ducks to a 64-48 win over Howard in the season finale.
Senior night is set for the last home game of the season which happened to also be the last game of the season for Odessa. Bernikow, playing his last game at home had one of the best games of the season leading all scorers with 24 points. He drained four three pointers in the game and had his best quarter of scoring in the third when he scored 13 points as the Ducks pulled away from the Wildcats. Jaylen said “I just kept listening to my coaches, they believed in me. They told me keep going, the ball is gonna go in sometime.”
They were able to turn an eight point lead at halftime into fourteen points behind the hot shooting from Bernikow and the Ducks defense. Odessa decided to run a 3-2 zone on the Wildcats which gave them trouble all game. They had a tough time trying to get off three point attempts and passing in the middle of the zone with the Ducks length and intensity.
After the game we asked Odessa head coach Dre Wilburn to talk to us about the decision to play zone. He said “So credit to my coaches. We talked about basketball a whole lot and what we wanted to do switch it up a little bit. We like to play man a lot, but we wanted to throw something new at them. We practiced that a lot yesterday. The players weren’t happy about that but I turned to one of my coaches during the game and said “that’s why we did that”.
Odessa finishes the regular season with a 16-4 record on the season. Howard sits at 13-6 on the season with one more regular season game left as they host Concord this Thursday Feb. 20th at 4:45pm.
Either way both teams will be competing for a state championship this postseason. They will just have to wait till Friday when the basketball committee meets Friday to choose the seedings and reveal the bracket for this year’s state championship. Good luck to both teams.
