The Niles Ring Lardner seventh grade boys’ basketball team improved to 2-0 Monday night with a thrilling 38-37 victory host Benton Harbor.

The Vikings opened the season with a 53-7 win over Coloma.

Trailing by 17 points in the second half, Niles used a 15-point fourth quarter to overcome the deficit and edge the Tigers.

Jacob Hamm led Ring Lardner with 14 points, while Alex Harpeneau added 13. Ben Florkowski added four points and Austin Curran three points and five rebounds. Hunter Slaughter hit a big shot down the stretch for the Vikings.

Against Coloma, Hamm led all scorers with 16 points, Harpeneau added 10 and Slaughter seven. Ring Lardner also got five points off the bench from Dustin Anders. Niles had 11 players score in the victory.

The Vikings face Lakeshore Wednesday at home.

Eighth grade

The Ring Lardner eighth grade boys’ team dropped a 46-26 decision to Benton Harbor as its record drops to 1-1.

After a slow start in the opening half, the Vikings were able to narrow the halftime deficit to just six points. Niles was able to cut the lead down to four on a couple of occasions in the third quarter, but the Tigers slowly began to pull away to the victory.

Ben Evans, Joe Avance, Derek Brown and Gavin Rasler did all the scoring for the Vikings with eight, seven, six and five points respectively.

Niles is back in action Wednesday against Lakeshore.

“We knew going into tonight that we were going to have to play almost perfect to walk out with a win,” Niles coach Mike Gallo said. “Benton Harbor does a great job of making you play faster than you want in their gym and we too often settled for the first good shot instead of the first great shot.

“However, I could not be more proud of the way our kids competed the entire night, especially on the boards. We won’t shoot like we did tonight every night and as long as we compete like we did this group will win a lot of basketball games. Unfortunately the score does not indicate just how competitive the game was and how hard our kids fought.”