Boys Prep Basketball: Panthers beat Chester, rematch Monday night

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[ Making their first of three potential trips to Chester within a week, Pinckneyville beat up on the Yellow Jackets 85-48 on Friday night in the final regular season meeting between the two teams, as Chester moves to the Black Diamond Conference in the fall.

The game also closed out the regular season, and the same two teams will meet up again on Monday in the first game of the Chester Regional that also features Sparta and Red Bud.

The Jackets didn't go quietly on Friday, however, as they fought gamely for sixteen minutes, trailing by only three at half before Pinckneyville took over in the third quarter.

The Panthers began the game with a 7-0 run, including a three-pointer by Drew Dudek with 6:52 to go in the opening frame.

Pinckneyville led by as many as thirteen in the first half, but Chester's Zach Lochhead came back with a barrage of three-pointers, four in all, to tie the game at 31-31 with just over two minutes to go in the first half.

Nothing went the Jackets way from that point on, however, as the Panthers outscored Chester 28-3 in the third quarter to put the game away, doing it with defense and fast-break opportunities.

Jake Bathon and Kyle Lamb each had six points in the third quarter run for the Panthers, Lamb doing it off the bench as coach Bob Waggoner has recently elected to go with five seniors in his starting lineup: Dudek, Bathon, Shay Kellerman, Landon Chandler and Nathan Morton.

The Panthers wound up second in the Southern Illinois River-to-River Conference Mississippi Division behind Du Quoin, finishing with a 22-5 overall record in the regular season.

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