Railer basketball team gets back on
track with 61-28 win over Quincy
[January 19, 2026]
LINCOLN – The LCHS boys basketball team overcame an early
sluggish start to beat Quincy 61-28.
The victory was a nice bounceback win for LCHS, as one night earlier
Normal U-High snapped the Railers’ six-game winning streak as the
Pioneers defeated Lincoln 56-37. On that night, the Railer offense
struggled for consistency, but perhaps more upsetting to Railer head
coach Neil Alexander was his team’s defensive performance, as U-High
pummeled Lincoln with a barrage of three-pointers and the Railer
seemed to lack the intensity Alexander likes to see from his
players.
From Alexander’s vantage point, that defensive focus should be there
every night, no matter how his team’s offense is performing.
“The defense should be every night…the same,” he said. “It shouldn’t
change, because it’s about effort. You can control your effort; you
can’t control whether the ball’s going to go in or not. There’s
going to be nights when it’s not going to go in, so I think you win
a lot of basketball games if you’re a very good defensive team, and
you focus on that.”
Karson Komnick
Initially against Quincy, the Railers looked as if the game might
get away from them. Karson Komnick sneaked in along the baseline
behind the Quincy defense, received an alley-oop pass from Tate Aue
and hit a layup to give Lincoln an early 2-0 lead.
Quincy got a field goal from Brennan Lepper before Aue hit a
three-pointer to put Lincoln up 5-2.
Quincy started a very young lineup with only one senior to go with a
sophomore and three freshmen. But early on in the contest, the Blue
Devils stayed composed in battling Lincoln’s experienced lineup of
juniors and seniors. And with just under three minutes left in the
first quarter when Thomas Woodson made a three-pointer for the Blue
Devils, the scoreboard showed Quincy had forged a 10-5 advantage.
LCHS head basketball coach Neil Alexander does not like using his
timeouts early in a game, but he called one at that point to not
only slow Quincy’s momentum, but to impart some words of wisdom to
his team as well.
“I thought we were not very aggressive,” Alexander explained. “We
were just standing around at both ends; we didn’t want to attack
defensively and we didn’t want to attach offensively. And we talked
about that, especially at the defensive end.
“Once we put the pressure on them, they struggled with pressure.”
The Railers responded, and when Karson Komnick hit a jumper near the
free throw line on Lincoln’s final possession of the quarter, the
Railers had made a 6-2 run and trailed 12-11 moving into the second
period. While that type of response by his team was probably what
Alexander hoped for in calling that first quarter timeout, the
Railer head coach likely had no idea what his team had in store in
the second quarter.
Preston Short
Lincoln reeled off the first seven points of the second period, as
Preston Short drained a three-pointer, Komnick hit a layup following
a Railer defensive steal and Tungate snared an offensive rebound and
hit the putback basket. That gave LCHS an 18-12 lead before Lepper
broke the Quincy scoring drought with a bucket for the Blue Devils.
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The Railers got 21 more points in the remainder of the
period—including a 17-0 run--for a total of 28 in the frame. That
made it Lincoln’s highest-scoring output in a quarter this season.
Komnick led the charge with 13 points in the period, including
another alley-oop play to close out the scoring in the quarter and
give Lincoln a 39-16 halftime advantage.
Tate Aue
Lincoln picked up where it left off in the third period, as the
Railers tallied the first seven points of the quarter, meaning that
LCHS had a 24-0 stretch in the middle quarters of the contest. The
last points of that 24-0 run came on a long three-pointer from Tate
Aue, giving Lincoln a 30-point lead of 46-16. From that point. The
margin ebbed and flowed for the remainder of the game. After Quincy
closed the gap slightly, Lincoln pushed back, and a fourth-quarter
trey from Komnick ballooned the Lincoln lead back to more than 30 at
57-25. The Railers went on to win 61-28.
While the margin on the scoreboard was sizeable, Alexander noted
that this Quincy team--with its starting lineup that included only
one senior along with three freshmen and a sophomore—will be a very
good team as its players grow and mature.
“They’re freshmen and sophomores, and they’re playing a varsity
schedule,” he said. “Eventually that’s going to pay off for them.
They’re very well coached. You can play one freshmen and get away
with it if you’ve got some solid juniors and seniors to help carry
the load. But when you ask three or four freshmen to be on the
varsity squad and to carry the load, that’s asking a lot. They’re
only getting better as the year goes on, but once we got our defense
attacking a little bit more, we created some things.”
Komnick led Lincoln with 22 points. Tungate added 17 and Aue tallied
nine.
The win improves Lincoln’s overall record to 17-4 while Quincy falls
to 5-12 with the loss.
The victory also moves Neil Alexander’s career win total as a head
coach to 995.
The Railers have three scheduled away games for next week,
including:
• Tue 1/20/2026 @ 7 PM @ Bloomington
• Fri 1/23/2026 @ 7 PM @ Mt. Zion
• Sat 1/24/2026 @ 6 PM @ Rock Island.
[Loyd Kirby]
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