Olathe South has clinched at least a share of the Sunflower League boys basketball championship and Lawrence High hopes to be the team that shares the title with the Falcons.

O-South (16-1 overall and 9-0 in league) will meet LHS (13-3, 6-1) tonight. Tipoff for the key league contest with sub-state seeding ramifications will be 7 p.m. in the Lions’ gym. KLWN 1320 will broadcast the game.

“If we could win that game and there’s a tie, we would have to be the one up there,” said LHS coach Chris Davis, whose squad is the only one with a chance to catch the Falcons.

O-South, which will be playing its fourth game in seven days, clinched a share of a title with a 53-41 victory over Shawnee Mission Northwest on Tuesday. The Falcons have won 14 in a row, including two overtime victories, since suffering their lone loss, a 43-38 setback to Independence (Mo.) Truman in the championship of the Olathe South tournament on Dec. 7. O-South is ranked No. 1 in Class 6A.

“We’ve got eight kids and we get different contributions from each of them on different nights,” said O-South coach John McFall, who is 164-58 with four league titles in 10 seasons with the Falcons. “The eight kids fit together pretty well. One of the keys is they listen to me and they learn. Since mid-January, they’ve played well as a team and understand the concepts we try to get across.”

O-South junior Ryan Rundberg, a 6-foot-2 guard and league sophomore of the year last season, averages 16 points a game to lead the Falcons. Rundberg and senior guard Trey O’Dell, averaging 13 points a game, are the lone starters back from last season, making the Falcons’ run to a league title somewhat surprising.

“Quite honestly, if you asked the coaches where they’d pick us before the season, I’m sure they would have picked us fifth or sixth,” said McFall, whose Falcons are assured of a league title for the first time since their state championship season in 1996-97. “Our kids have done a great job.”

McFall wasn’t surprised to see Lawrence in a hunt for a league title.

“Lawrence is a good team,” McFall said. “At the beginning of the year when you started naming teams you thought would be at the top of the league, you named Lawrence.”

O-South averages 58.3 points a game and surrenders 46.2 per game.

“They play really quality team basketball,” Davis said. “Good team basketball got them where they are. They press most of the game and they switch back and forth between man and zone and keep you off balance.”

LHS, which has three league games left, has been steady all season. The Lions have have won three in a row and 12 of 13.

Senior guards D.J. Watkins (18.3 ppg) and Stephen Vinson (15.0 ppg) lead the Lions, who average 60.4 points a game.

Watkins, who has 45 three-pointers this season and 93 for his prep career, needs two more threes to set an LHS record for three-pointers in a career.

The Lions are also on pace to set a team record for three-pointers made in a season. LHS has 103 threes with at least five games left. The 1994-95 state championship team ranks No. 1 with 115 three-pointers.

Vinson (29 threes) and junior Bryan Cargill (18 three) also can connect from long range.

“That’s a big part of our offense,” Davis said of the three-point shot. “As much as we stress it and practice it, I’m glad we’ve been able to convert it. The kids who are making them are working at them a lot.”

LHS hasn’t won a Sunflower League title in boys basketball since the 1985-86 season, when the Lions finished 10-2 in the seven-team league. That season, league schools played each other twice.