PERU - You can't blame them for trying.

Kevin Miller and Jeremiah Laws broke out old Whitko jerseys for Friday night's game against heavily favored Peru. The off-white uniforms with blue numbers stood out against the rest of the teams' white shirts with red numbers. Maybe Miller and Laws hoped that a bit of the old Whitko magic would still be lingering on those jerseys. And for most of the first half, that seemed to be the case.

But in the end, Peru was just too strong and athletic in expanding a seven-point halftime lead for a 76-53 home victory in the sectional semifinal game.

For the Wildcats, the game marked the end of season No. 1 under Fred Fields and will go down as the worst season in school history with a final record of 5-17, outdoing last year's 10-11 record.

Against Peru in the sectional semifinal, Whitko faced a team that put pressure on the ball from tip-off until the final buzzer. Whether the Tigers were pushing the ball up the floor on offense or running a full-court press on defense, Whitko was never allowed to get into the easy offensive rhythm that it had against Valley on Tuesday night. Eventually, that wore the Wildcats down.

"If you take one team that's a little more dominant physically, what you hope to do is hang around as long as you possibly can," Whitko head coach Fred Fields said. "Then you never know what can happen down the stretch. Our kids did a very good job of doing what we asked them to do in the first half."

Whitko did lead Peru 24-21 with 2:44 to play in the first half before the Tigers went on a 12-2 run to close out the first 16 minutes. In that stretch to open the game, the Wildcats did a good job defensively in confusing Peru.

"We were switching defenses about every two possessions," Fields said. "It helped keep Peru off-balanced. Even when we were ahead, I was sitting there thinking, 'When Peru figures this out, we've got to be ready to go to something else.' And then, when the dam broke, it broke."

Those Wildcats went downhill in a hurry after the Tigers figured out how to attack the Whitko defense as freshman point guard Brandon Jones took over the game.

In the third quarter, Jones scored eight points, six of them on three consecutive possessions as Peru went from a 39-29 lead to 45-29.

He continued to pour it on in the fourth quarter with eight more points, four rebounds and two assists to finish with 24 points.

"He was the one kid that, because of his skills, it didn't really matter if we were in man or zone," Fields said. "I don't think he knew (what defense we were in), but I don't think he cared. That's the scariest thing."

Senior Bo Mullins led Whitko with 12 points. Following him in scoring were seniors Miller and Jered Deckena with 10 points and nine points each. The other two seniors on the team, Chad Schipper and Laws, struggled to score nine points combined.

"It's been a tough last three years, especially for these seniors," Fields said. "They deserve a lot of compliments for staying with it like they have. I'm disappointed for these seniors because they really began coming on. A lot of coaches in this situation would have dumped the seniors and gone young, but they kept showing that that's not what should happen."

Fields has talked at length about feeder systems and off-season workouts to bring Whitko back to the type of program that it once was. He said that he'll take a little vacation and then start working with the youngsters.

"I'm going to take some time off until Sunday afternoon at about 1:30 in the afternoon," he said. "We go into the gym and we'll have 45 or 50 kids in our spring and summer teams working out. We'll get our two fifth grade teams going and our two sixth grade teams going. Our seventh and eighth grades are already rolling. We want to use these (varsity) kids as examples and get this thing going." [[In-content Ad]]