When you find yourself in a slugfest, you’ve got to find a haymaker and the Austin boys basketball team had their smallest player deliver a couple of big-time punches as the No. 4 ranked Packers beat Winona 68-51 in Packer Gym Friday.

LaHenry Gills, a 5-foot, 6-inch guard, finished with 10 points and he gave the Packers a big boost with his dribble penetration and energy. He converted a big-time finish against the teeth of the Winona defense to put Austin up 42-36 with eight minutes left in the game. He also had a key drive for a score that put Austin up 38-34.

“LaHenry’s play was a spark plug and he was a catalyst for everything that happened for us. I think he was outstanding and this was his night,” Austin head coach Kris Fadness said. “He was pretty special. At the same time, I thought Gavin Owens was really strong around the basket, especially defensively.”

Agwa Nywesh, who led the Packers (11-2 overall, 10-1 Big Nine) with 24 points and seven rebounds, hit a three-pointer to put Austin up 45-36 right after Gills’ big finish.

Nywesh said Gills has a tendency to lift up the whole team.

“When LaHenry gets his buckets, I feel like I’m scoring too. He has that little fire that none of us have. It’s a special thing and that makes him a special kid,” Nywesh said. “It was like a team thing (tonight). We were all starting to hang our heads, but when Fadness told us to play for each other that sort of lit a fire in my eyes to play for the guy next to me, to play for my teammate and play for my energy. I wasn’t even tired then and I was happy to play for my family.”

Winona (8-5 overall, 5-4 Big Nine) had a 17-16 lead early on and it hung around for most of the night before Austin closed the game on a 30-15 burst over the last 10 minutes.

Fadness gave the Winhawks a lot of credit for playing strong man-to-man defense.

“I thought we played hard the whole game. I thought our kids really battled and played hard,” Fadness said. “Winona’s a good team. (Terrell) Hall is as good as a defender and an athlete as we’ve seen in our conference, (Jake) Reeck can really shoot it and thankfully he didn’t have that good of a shooting game tonight and (Bradley) Winter can play around the basket. I thought they were good defensively and they made some things hard on our kids.”

Ngor Deng picked up the pace for Austin as well in the win as he finished with 12 points, three rebounds and three assists.

“We were feeding off each other. We were getting stops and we were getting energy off that,” Deng said. “We’ve got to stay ready and we’ve got keep on playing hard.”

Winona 20  31  —  51

Austin 25  43  —  68

Austin scoring: Agwa Nywesh, 24; Medi Obang, 14; Ngor Deng, 12; LaHenry Gills, 10; Teyghan Hovland, 6; Gavin Owens, 2; free throws: 50 percent (8-for16); rebounds: 34 (Nywesh, 7); turnovers: 15