Jefferson City stayed balanced with its scoring while Hickman relied heavily on one player Wednesday night. The balanced approach won out.
The Jays had five players score at least eight points in a 68-56 win against the Kewpies at Fleming Fieldhouse.
"I thought we did a good job at staying balanced," Jefferson City coach Mark Anderson said. "Offensively, I'd like to see our movement a little bit better, but that's not terribly unusual for a motion team in December to just not quite be crisp yet. But I thought we did a nice job at kind of spreading the ball around."
The Kewpies never led but Jarvis Jennings didn't let the Jays completely blow past them.
Jennings scored more than half of Hickman's points and took about 36 percent of its shots to score a game-high 29 points on 12-of-17 shooting. He also made 5-of-6 from the free-throw line.
"You're pleased with 68 points, not thrilled with 56," Anderson said. "So many of them coming from a guy that we knew was going to go left and I just didn't think we executed the game plan very well against them. He's a heck of a player. I don't know if it was our best effort, but it's nice to get the win."
Jennings scored all of Hickman's eight first-quarter points, but Jefferson City had four players combine for 15 in the opening eight minutes.
Garrett Parker, who scored 10 points, started the game with a 3-pointer, but the next 12 Jefferson City points came inside the paint.
Point guard Brennan Jeffries scored all 23 of his points either at the rim or from the free-throw line. He was 7-of-10 on his 2-pointers and 9-of-13 from the line.
Jays big man DaMani Jarrett shot 5-of-6 from the floor and 2-of-2 at the line for 12 points.
Jennings scored seven quick points to start to second quarter to pull Hickman within 19-15, but Jeffries later got a 9-0 run started with a three-point play. Parker also converted a three-point play to finish off the run that made it 34-19 late in the first half.
Jennings and Jeffries traded buckets to make it 36-21 at halftime.
But turnovers and missed shots allowed Hickman to start the second half on a 9-2 run to cut the Jays' lead to eight with 5:20 left in the third quarter.
"We talked about winning the first four minutes of the second half," Anderson said. "That's a huge momentum pat of the game and I thought we allowed them to claw back in the game pretty quickly."
The Jays were 1-for-5, including 0-for-3 from beyond the arc, during the run.
"We get in the habit of one three follows another," Anderson said. "When we shoot one then we shoot five. We've got to make sure we maintain some post presence. We've got to make sure we get something off the dribble and off the drive."
The Jays went right to Jarrett for an inside bucket and Rae'Quan Davis added a pair of free throws for a 4-0 spurt. Davis made all six of his free throws on his way to 10 points.
"We at least played well enough to kind of maintain that distance," Anderson said. "We threw a lot of different defenses at them and I was pleased with how we managed those."
The score was 46-34 at the end of the third quarter and Jefferson City made 14-of-17 free throws in the fourth quarter to keep Hickman at bay. The Jays were 25-of-31 from the line for the game.
Next up for Jefferson City (4-0) is a matchup with district foe Battle (2-0), which visits Fleming Fieldhouse on Saturday for the Capital City Shootout. The Jays and Spartans will close out the Shootout with a 7 p.m. tip.
"This is our one chance to seed ourselves," Anderson said. "Hopefully we'll have two good practices and be ready to go."
The Jays will hope to defend Battle's Trae Meny better than Jennings.
"It's kind of the same thing, in a different way, but it's kind of the same thing," Anderson said. "Jennings is the kid that makes Hickman go and Meny is the kid that makes Battle go."
Jefferson City won Wednesday's JV game 55-43.
Sterling DeSha and Josh White scored 19 and 15, respectively, for the Jays.