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Greenville High and the Trojans of Charles Henderson battled to the end Tuesday night, as the lead swapped hands several times in the fourth quarter, but the Tigers prevailed for a 67-64 win over the Trojans in Betty Wagoner Hall on the campus of CHHS in a key Class 5A area contest.

Greenville led 63-59 with 22 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, but Akeives Shorts was fouled on a three-point attempt and hit all three of his free throws to cut the lead to 63-62. The Trojans quickly stole the ball, and Shorts hit a jumper to put CHHS ahead 64-63 with 19 seconds to play in the game.

The Tigers drew fouls and hit their free throws in the final seconds for the 67-64 win.

CHHS head coach Doug Branson and his team were understandably disappointed with the close setback, but he was proud and pleased with the fight of his squad.

“It’s an area game, it was competitive, Greenville brought in a really nice squad, they played well, they hit shots, and in the end they made one or two more plays than we did,” said Coach Branson. “You don’t get to a one-point game with less than a minute to play without both teams playing well. They made one more play than we did.

“We fought, but that’s who we are. I’m not proud of us because we played hard, I’m proud of us because of who we are. We are a team that does that every night. It’s not just one game against another good team, its Trojan basketball all the time. That’s who we are. We play hard. We do things the right way. We didn’t make enough plays tonight where they made a play or two that we didn’t. Now we are in a hole, we’re down 0-1 in the area. Now we’ve got to come back out of this. We have Andalusia coming to us Friday. We need to protect that, and next Tuesday we go to Greenville. So hopefully we can go over there and repay them.”

The Trojans, now 13-6 on the year, were led in scoring by Akeives Shorts with 26 points, Tray Knox with 18, Jywon Boyd added eight points, while Zack Henderson, Cody Youngblood and Carl Burney added four points each.