Drew Keding’s scoring slump appears to be history.

The Armada senior scored nine of his team-high 15 points in the fourth quarter Tuesday to help the Tigers defeat Parkway Christian 53-50 in a non-league boys basketball game.

Coach Chris Haller said he had a talk with Keding before the game and challenged him to make more of a contribution on offense.

“I was in a slump the last few weeks,” Keding said. “Coach does a great job instilling confidence in me. I went through the same thing last year and he helped me through it.”

Keding’s defense and leadership has been a constant throughout the season and is a reason the Tigers have won seven of their first nine games.

“He’s definitely one of our leaders through how he plays,” Haller said. “He’s been struggling the last few games so we talked about how he could get some more looks because we need him to be an offensive threat as well as the strong defensive threat that he is.

“I trust him to defend any of the big players we go up against. I challenged him before the game. After the game he gave me a wink and said, ‘how was that?’ He kept (Tyler Powers) out of the paint, got some strong rebounds and finished at the rim.”An 11-3 run by Armada in the fourth quarter gave the Tigers their biggest lead of the game, 50-40, with 1:28 left. Parkway battled back to cut the lead to 51-47 on a basket by Nathaniel Harrison with 15 seconds left, but Keding was fouled and made two free throws with 10.6 seconds remaining to secure the win.

“A lot of our wins are grinding it out at the end,” Keding said. “We don’t blow teams out. We’re in every game. We have to play the full 32 minutes and finish the job.”

Keding was on the Tigers’ football team that finished 10-2 and advanced to the Division 5 regional final before losing to eventual state champion Notre Dame Prep.

“It taught us how to win,” Keding said of the football season. “It taught us how to work as a team, too. Most of us played football and we’ve been together for most of our lives. Last year’s football was big for us.”

The game was tight all the way with 10 lead changes and five ties. That’s what Haller was hoping for after a tough loss last Friday to Croswell-Lexington in a Blue Water Area Conference game.

“There were things we needed to work on and fix after that game,” Haller said. “This game was all about being competitive and getting a win against a really good team but working on those things at the same time. Some of the things we identified as issues against Cros-Lex on Friday, we definitely improved on.”

Last year, Armada didn’t get its seventh win until the final game of the regular season.

“They were all learning to play the varsity game,” Haller said. “There were tough times last year but they stuck through them and got better. Now we’re able to use that to be successful this year.’

Lucas Pratt finished with 14 points for Armada and TJ Seiler added 13.

The defeat was only Parkway’s third in 11 games and coach Micah McLain said the game could help the Eagles down the road.

“It’s good to play a bigger school and different competition than we’ve been playing,” he said. “It’s nice to see what we’ll see in the playoffs.

“It was hard-fought the entire game. We came up a little short but we played hard. That’s what matters.”

This is McLain’s first year as head coach but he’s been with the program for four years, so he isn’t surprised that the Eagles didn’t go down without a fight.

“It’s something we’ve been hammering home since I’ve been here,” he said. “Up 30 or down 30 we play out hardest and let the score dictate itself.”

McLain said the team-first attitude is what has contributed to Parkway’s strong start.

“They’re playing unselfish,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to the guys whether they score 20 points or zero. It doesn’t matter to them if they pass up a shot for somebody else to get a better shot. They do whatever they can to help the team win.”

Harrison led the Eagles with 19 points, Powers had 11 and Julian Montano finished with seven.