By Dave Morrison

CHARLESTON – Another day at the office.

Shady Spring turned Hampshire over 28 times and had four players in double figures in easily winning its Class AAA quarterfinal battle against Hampshire  82-41 Thursday at the Coliseum.

But it was the turnovers on the other side that surprised Shady coach Ronnie Olson.

“We had zero turnovers at halftime,” Olson said. “And honestly, Hampshire played some good defense. They were playing up the line on us, they pressured us. And for those guys to have zero turnovers at halftime is pretty doggoned good. To turn them over 17 times to zero, that says it all. You’re going to win tons of games at any level when you turn guys over like that.”

Hampshire coach Danny Alkire and his players, who were trying duplicate their feat of knocking off a No. 1 seed. agreed. They remain the only 8 to beat a 1 in the tournament seeding era. But not this time.

“You know they run and jump, and we knew to a tee where they were coming from, even though it didn’t look that way during the game,” Alkire said. “You can’t replicate that leading into the game. Once you get that the speed is different, the strength of them is different. The wright room is important, and you can tell they are in the weight room in offseason. Preparing for the pressure that they throw at you and getting through it was probably the hardest thing. That was evident in the first half.”

“That’s the best team we’ve seen before,” Jensen Fields said. “They run, they jump, you turn your head, and they are there. In the regular season we played a lot of good teams but that team right there was a team like we’ve never seen before.”

Shady’s ramped up defense, which has not allowed more than Thursday’s 41 in the postseason, started early.

A  game-altering 23-2 run spanning the first and second quarters took a three-point lead to 24. The Tigers got to the rim for baskets and four different players had 3s during the run – Cam Manns, Braden Chapman, Cole Chapman and Ammar Maxwell.

Shady led 49-19 at the half.

“It feels like we are really tough to stop, knowing that any of us can get off and do our thing,” Braden Chapman said of the feeling of a game-changing run. “I think we have a special group here.”

Ammar Maxwell had 22 to lead the Tigers, making 10 of 14 shots. It was his 15^th straight double figure game. Braden Chapman had 15 points, Manns had 13 and Cole Chapman had 11.

The emergence of Maxwell has been big in the Tigers elevation to a team haswon 19 straight (22-3).

“Ammar is going to be the best player in the state of West Virginia next year,” Olson said. “And he doesn’t do it outside the contest of the offense. He’s passing to Cam. He’s passing to Braden. Ammar is a terror.

“He is (starting to understand how good he can be). Any college coach, anybody who knows basketball knows he is not taking the shots that he shouldn’t take, he is not ball-hogging, he is playing within the confines of the game and that translates to a great basketball on another level as well. He’s kicking when it needs kicked, he’s driving when he sees lanes, he’s going at the offensive glass, gets rebounds. And the way he sat down and guard fullcourt today was impressive as well. He can do it all.”

Shady’s starters – sophomore Jack Williams made his first start of the year in place of Jaedan Holstein, and Olson said the reason would remain in house – had at least three steals each. They had 17 of the Tigers’ 20 steals.

“We’ve had a hard practice the last three weeks,” Olson said. “If you have watched us and we could ramp it up a little more we were going to do it. I know they thought I was being meticulous and just nip-picking but I knew what was going to hopefully get us a wins up here and hopefully win a state championship and that is turn it up one more notch. You can’t just play the way you played in the regular season. You’ve got to play better in th sectional. You’ve got to play better in the regional. You’ve got to bring you’re a game out here. They did that tonight.

“That doesn’t mean we are going to do it tomorrow. We’ve got to put our jerseys back on. We’ve got a new opponent tomorrow, either Scott or Herbert Hoover and it’s going to be a new opponent and hopefully what we’ve done so far has prepared us for this moment to hopefully go to another state championship game.””

Shady will be back Friday at 5:30 p.m. playing Scott, which beat the other Region 3 representative, Hoover.