By Ed Piper, Jr.
Patrick Henry showed why it may end up being the Eastern League champion, downing host La Jolla convincingly, 60-46, on Senior Night, which was also Valentine's Day, Tues., Feb. 14.
Henry (8-1) travels to Serra (7-2) Thursday night to decide the league title on the final night of the regular season. Henry, under third-year Coach Jason Bryant, the former Lincoln coach when the Hornets won the state title in 2010, has only lost to the Vikings, when they had a full lineup.
The Patriots, including 6'7" power forward Joshua Burton, hit three-pointers that in the two teams' previous meeting on the Henry home court they didn't hit, and it made for a whole different ballgame.
Burton looked stellar, showing a touch from long range, as well as some maneuverability underneath.
The hosts, behind an emotional starting five of seniors--with a sixth senior, Reed Farley, watching from the sidelines on crutches--played gamely, but they just couldn't defuse the smart bombs from long range.
The Vikings were only down 8-6 halfway through the first quarter, when they let the lead get a little out of hand. Senior Daniel McColl hit a beautiful shot on a feed from classmate McClain Thiel to open the game, and Nick Hammel soon followed a Thiel misfire with his own basket for a short-lived 4-3 La Jolla lead.
When McColl hit a too-rare, but well-formed, jumper from the side, the Pats were just heating up behind shooting guard Sam Galaif. Galaif, a 6'2" senior captain, sank two out of three from beyond the arc. Then 6'6" Christian Choice hit his own three, followed by the uninhibited Galaif, who didn't hesitate to shoot.
This is what their veteran coach, Bryant, expected, but which the Vikings had not seen before.
7
Meanwhile, LJHS Coach Paul Baranowski stayed with his senior starters--McColl and Hammel being the only regular starters, alongside Thiel, Garrett Brown, and Francisco Ramos--through the end of the quarter.
Speaking of Brown after the game, Baranowski, who could also have been speaking of his other senior reserves, said, "Garrett can still give you something at times. When he's contributing like that, why take him out?"
The red-and-black seniors were playing with emotion. But the lead ballooned to 14-6 closing the period, 19-8 early in the second quarter. The Vikings, though playing hard, weren't scoring enough against an aggressive Henry defense. The half ended with La Jolla trailing by a respectable 10, 28-18.
The Patriots weren't playing around, though. They came out torrid in the third quarter, burying La Jolla under a barrage of scores inside and out, and the landscape changed quickly to a despicable 48-28.
Junior Quinn Rawdin, who had had to sit that first quarter while his elders started, put on one of his best two shooting demonstrations of the season in the final quarter to help bring the Vikes within nine, 50-41. The lefty guard canned four threes in the stanza--he banked one of them--and showing confidence and aggression added a one-handed runner on the left side of the lane.
But Henry, anxious to close out the win against the Farley-less Vikings, held solid and won by 14.
No comments:
Post a Comment