NEW WASHINGTON (Crawford County Now) — Buckeye Central coach Chris Moyer has been handed a bunch of lemons early this season.

As a result, he’s learning to make lemonade.

With injuries riddling his planned offense, Moyer has turned to defense as his primary focus.

Employing a sticky matchup 2-3 zone defense, the Bucks were able to limit Bucyrus’ offense and came away with a 42-35 win in a Northern 10 Athletic Conference game Thursday night.

“It’s about the only way we’re going to stay in games,” Moyer said. “We’re going to have to do it from the defensive end. With Jack and Alec (Phillips brothers) out, it’s a big part of what we do.

“The kids are doing a good job of adjusting to it,” he continued. “It’s no secret. We’ve played zone four straight games now and it’s the way we’re going to have to play.”

The zone would seem to be the perfect defense to face for the Redmen, who rely heavily on their perimeter shooting. But the ball was not going in from deep, as the visitors managed just two 3-point shots on the night.

“They kind of did the same thing to Upper (Sandusky). We talked about getting the ball to the center, going post to post,” Bucyrus coach Brian Hargis said. “We did at times, but they did job of taking it away.

“Until the ball goes in the hole, I don’t think anybody should guard us out there. We were two for 23 against Elgin. It wasn’t much better tonight — we probably shot less.”

Bucyrus (1-1, 0-1 N10) was, in fact, 2 for 18 from beyond the arc. When the Redmen got the ball inside, they were 11 for 22. Post Carson Witten scored a team-high 10 points on the block.

“Witten’s crafty down there. He does a great job,” Moyer said. “Obviously, that’s on our scouter. We’ll go over it. There were some bad rotations in the zone, but Brian always has a great game plan.”

After a slow start that saw the Redmen jump out to a 7-0 lead, the Bucks got a buzzer-beater 3 from Hunter Caudill to pull within 7-3 after one. It was a momentum changer and just the tip of the iceberg for Caudill’s night.

“Hunter’s shot at the end of the first — we hadn’t scored a point — Hunter hit a big shot there,” Moyer said. “We’re asking a lot out of Hunter, handling the ball, he’s our senior point guard. I got into him pretty good at halftime. He’s got to take the leadership responsibility for getting us into our offense.”

Caudill ended with a game-high 19 points to lead the Buckeye Central offense.

“We didn’t put the ball in the hole and just a lot of silly turnovers,” Hargis said. “And you let Caudill go off and score 13 of their 18 first-half points. He outplayed all of us. A few of their guys outplayed us.”

Buckeye Central rallied from the slow start to take an 18-15 lead by intermission and never trailed again. Bucyrus got within one, at 28-27, on a basket by Dylan Coppler at 7:28 of the fourth quarter but could never tie or regain the lead.

Our margin for error is not going to be very big,” Moyer said. “We have to execute. I thought we rebounded much better tonight. We turned it over a ton (13), but it was better than the previous 3 games.”

Lane Caudill ended with nine points and six rebounds for the Bucks to second Hunter Caudill.

Georgie Floyd was next to Witten’s 10 with nine points and Coppler had eight points and a game-high 14 rebounds for the Redmen.

Besides 15 turnovers, Hargis pointed to other mistakes that were collectively costly.

“We had three lane violations (on free throws) — I’ve never seen that,” Hargis said. “We had turnovers where no one touched the ball on an inbounds pass, coming off the bench and not knowing who you’re guarding or what defense we’re in. If you had a checklist of what we did wrong, it’s pretty long today.”

“Brian’s going to look at it and say, ‘We just didn’t shoot it well tonight,’ and they didn’t,” Moyer said. “Georgie’s going to shoot it better. It’s early in the season. Sometimes you see stuff like that.’

“We said we’d win the game with defense. Maybe I switched it up a little too much,” Hargis said. “And then foul trouble — that’s not even an excuse. They forced the issues for us to get into foul trouble. Kudos to them and kudos to Coach Moyer.”

Buckeye Central made it a sweep on the night with a 37-29 win in the junior varsity game. Isaiah Kaiser had a game-high 25 points to lead the Bucks.

Kayden Baxter had eight and Quin Ross added six for the Redmen.

Box scores

Bucyrus                      7          8       10      10 — 35

Buckeye Central       3        14       11      14 — 42

Stats

Bucyrus (1-1, 0-1 N10): Shots 13-40; 3-pt. shots 2-18 (Lincoln Blizzard, Georgia Floyd); Free throws 7-13; Rebounds 29 (Dylan Coppler 14); Turnovers 15. Scoring: Charlie Randall 2 1 5, Lincoln Blizzard 1 0 3, Georgie Floyd 2 4 9, Dylan Coppler 3 2 8, Carson Witten 5 0 10.

Buckeye Central (1-3, 1-1 N10): Shots 15-36; 3-pt. shots 1-11 (Hunter Caudill); Free throws 11-23; Rebounds 26 (Lane Caudill 6); Turnovers 13. Scoring: Hunter Caudill 6 6 19, Donnie Fourtner 1 0 2, Jeremiah Fishpaw 2 2 6, Lane Caudill 4 1 9, Hayden Hafner 2 2 6.

JV: Buckeye Central 37-29.