Players from Northfield and Southwood's girls basketball teams battled for a rebound in a game earlier this month between the two schools. The teams will meet in opening round action of the Wabash County Tourney on Friday. Photos by Joseph Slacian

By Bill Barrows

The 2017 Wabash County Basketball Tourney will be at Wabash High School on Friday and Saturday, Dec. 29-30. The pairings for the entire first round of games pits the same schools against each other in both JV and varsity and in both girls and boys for the first time in recent memory.

At 9 a.m. Friday, Northfield faces Southwood in the girls JV tipoff. That will be followed at 10:30 a.m. by the Northfield boys JV taking on Southwood. At noon, Manchester and Wabash girls JV teams will play followed at 1:30 p.m. by the Manchester -Wabash boys JV contest.

Southwood's Dallas Holmes goes up to block Manchester's Logan Parrett's shot in the Knights win over the Squires Friday night. Photo by Eric Christiansen

By The Paper staff

The Southwood Knights used an 18-2 run to take the lead over Manchester and held off multiple Squire come-back runs to pull out a 78-66 win in Three Rivers Conference play on Friday night in boys basketball action..

Manchester had the hot hand early, taking a 10-7 lead with 3:23 left in the first quarter, but the Knights caught fire scoring 18 of the next 20 points over a four-minute stretch.

Southwood's Carson Blair kept the Squires at bay scoring 16 points in the fourth quarter to help the Knights to the 12-point win. Blair led Southwood with 23 points, while Peyton Trexler also had 23 points, Dallas Holmes had 19 and Matthew Nose had 11.