AUGUSTA - Sam Leclerc was the man with the plan. Larry Foster was the man of action.

Foster scored 10 points in the third quarter and all of his 15 points in the second half, and Leclerc tallied 19 points, and helped his coaching staff make an important adjustment, as second-seeded Winthrop earned its second regional championship game berth in three years with a 59-46 victory over No. 3 Traip Academy in the Western Class C semifinals Thursday night at the Augusta Civic Center.

With the Ramblers down by three early in the second half, Foster took over at both ends of the floor, scoring his 10 points and collecting two steals in a little over two minutes to spark a 12-2 Rambler run that put them in front for good.

"I thought that if I didn't come out and play the way I played, we had a good chance of letting them stay in the game, and I wasn't about to let that happen," Foster said.

Foster scored from inside and outside, kicking off the run with a 3-pointer, then converting a layup off a feed from Sam Leclerc. Eric Modica's drive to the hoop for Traip tied the game for the last time with 5:41 left in the third quarter, then Foster tipped in a miss and drilled another trey to put Winthrop (19-1) in front to stay.

"Larry didn't seem to be with it much in that first half. He wasn't rebounding well. He wasn't boxing out well," Winthrop coach Dennis Dacus said. "At halftime, I told him, 'You've got to wake up for us. You've got to play for us.' He comes out, sticks a 3, gets it again, sticks another 3, and that woke him up."

"We knew that we'd have to box out Foster and we didn't touch him at all," Traip coach Jeremy Paul said.

Foster finished with seven rebounds, five off the offensive glass.

Traip turned the ball over on eight of its first 10 possessions of the game as Winthrop flew out to a 14-2 lead, but the Rangers (17-2) settled down in the second quarter and tightened up on defense with a 1-2-2 zone. Winthrop made just two of eight shots in the quarter and Traip, powered by a pair of Tyler Metevier 3-pointers, took a 22-21 lead into the locker room.

"Our Achilles heel all year has been the zone defense," Dacus said. "They really extended the 1-2-2. It wasn't a packed in 1-2-2, so we had to go in at halftime and make the adjustments."

The adjustments, suggested by Leclerc, involved spreading the zone out and attacking the soft middle.

"We were trying to reverse the ball (in the first half), but they had guys where we were," Leclerc said. "We tried to run our zone offense, and they were leaving the middle wide open. So, I said we should get some quick cuts into the middle, some quick hits, maybe a 12-footer, and if not, we'd have a pitch to the low block for a wide-open layup, and it happened for us."

Using that strategy, Winthrop went 7-for-10 from the field in the third quarter and shot 62 percent in the second half.

"They adjusted to the zone, then they just caught on fire," said Paul, whose team helped that shooting percentage with 23 turnovers that led to some transition points for Winthrop. "We practiced all week closing out on their shooters. We did a halfway decent job, but they made a lot of shots, and we didn't box out (on the misses)."

The Ramblers held a 12-6 advantage on the offensive boards and began to pull away when Foster and Ezra Damm (nine points) converted back-to-back putbacks to make it 50-36 with 5:44 left.

Tim Gingras chipped in with 10 points for Winthrop. Modica led Traip with 16 points, while Metevier finished with 14.