Wayland boys overcame a sluggish start to take out South Christian in the Sailors’ basketball lair Friday evening, 67-51.

The two teams were tied 14-all at the close of the first quarter, but the inside-outside combination of senior center Lacey James and senior point guard Dilon Aten proved to be too much. The Wildcats pulled away gradually with 13-6 and 22-18 advantages in the middle two periods and by the early stages of the fourth stanza they were comfortably ahead by 20 points.

South Christian pinned the Wildcats’ ears back in the first couple of minutes, as all-state quarterback John Wassink proved he’s also a pretty fair basketball player as well, scoring five points in the first minute alone.

But by the time 3:30 was showing on the clock in the opening period,, Wayland had come back to be down by just one point, 10-9 and knotted the count at 14-all. But the Wildcats were showing troubling symptoms of that old “free throw flu” bug, making only four of their first 11 attempts. And with the street ball running and gunning style, they missed a lot of shots that should have fallen.

Wayland turned up the defense a notch in the second quarter, holding the Sailors to just six points and taking a 27-20 lead at intermission.

It was at the beginning of the second half half that Aten tossed an anchor to sink the Sailors with back-to-back threes to put the visiting quintet head by 11, 33-22. Later he came up with big steals and took off on the fast break break, pulling up to can short jumpers. The home team never came closer than seven points in the entire second half.

Closer to the hoop, South Christian, with its tallest guy checking in at 6-3, had no answer for the 6-9 James, who went to the iron often and showed a few signs of breaking out of his free throw shooting woes.

Aten had his highest individual scoring game in quite a spell, dropping in 22 points. James added 19 and sophomores Avery Hudson and Zac Nieuwkoop both contributed nine.

Wassink finished with 27 points and Eric VanVoorst had nine.

The Wildcats, now 10-2 on the season overall and 3-2 after the first round in the O-K Gold Conference, will play at Detroit Country Day Saturday in an interesting nonleague matchup against a storied athletic powerhouse.

PHOTO: Dilon Aten regained some of his scoring touch with 22 points against South Christian Friday evening. (Photo courtesy Kenny Ritz)