I'll Be a Son of a Shark

[CoachC]

Jan 26: Our next opponent, Presbyterian made a big statement last night crushing Campbell by 28 pts and moving into a tie for 2. Oh my! We are in a 3 way tie for 5th.

[CoachC]

Tonight we take on one of the hottest teams in the league in the Blue Hose. Coming off of their eye-popping blowout of Campbell, they've won 5 of their last 6. Their only conference losses have been on the road against 1st place High Point and 2nd place Charleston Southern. They look unassuming on paper, but get great team play, leading the league in scoring, 2nd in field goal percentage, 2nd in defensive field goal percentage, 2nd in points allowed, and 1st in free throw percentage. They do lead the league in turnovers, however and that may be their one weakness.

If anyone takes the night off on either end of the court tonight we may get buried. Win or lose, I expect a much better effort in this one than in our last.

Their crowd is close to their 2500 capacity and loud as we go to the opening tip.

by the first media time out at 14:21 everyone is taking the night off at both ends of the floor and we trail 18-4. They are 8-8 from the field thus far. Over the next 6 minutes we play a bit better and at the 7:54 mark the lead has been trimmed to 21-13.

The rest of the half we go back to playing lousy defense, and at the break we are down 31-41. We allow them to shoot over 63% for the half, and there's not much else to say.

Better defense in the 2nd half has pulled us within 3 at 7:38, but horrible free throw shooting (8-16) has kept us from forging a lead.

The last media timeout comes at 2:39 and we still trail 66-73. Missed freethrows have killed us. We aren't able to cut it closer than 3 and lose by 6. We have found a new way to lose. 15 for 25 freethrow shooting from the game (and it only got that good after Lemeke got to the line a couple of times. We spent all night missing front ends of the 1 and bonus) did us in along with horrible play in the first 6 minutes of the game combined to prevent us from possibly winning this game. Still the effort was there in the 2nd half, and I can't fault our guys on that.

Both teams were sloppy with the basketball as we turned it over 18 times and the Blue Hose 19. We outrebounded them by a wide margin and outscored them on the break 23 - 10. If we had played with determined effort for 40 minutes instead of 34 we would have won this game.

Porter led us with 19 off the bench, Woods 18, Lemeke 12. Williams had a solid game as well with 8 pts, 8 rebs, 3 steals.


Final: 74-80

[CoachC]

Jan 29 High Point wins on the road again over VMI and improves to 8-0. After going 2-9 in the non-conference schedule, they have a winning record for the first time this year. The Blue Hose are now in sole possession of 2nd. We've fallen to a 3 way time for 6th.

Only High Point (126) and Presbyterian (132) have RPIs in the top half of Div I.

Bradley and O'Connor both score highly on the SATs as we expected.

[PointGuard]

Maybe your conference doesn't have good RPI's, but it must lead the nation in weird school nicknames...paced by the: Fighting Camels, Blue Hose, Chanticleers, Keydets.

[CoachC]

It certainly does have that! Plus the Bulldogs and the Runnin' Bulldogs are both in the conference just 20 miles apart.

[CoachC]

Feb 2
High Point and Presbyterian both continue to roll with wins last night. We are now alone in 7th.

[CoachC]

The Chanticleers (our S.I.D. Bobby Randall explains to me a Chanticleer is a big blue chicken. I just stare at him blankly.) are a half game ahead of us in the standings. They have extremely balanced scoring and run motion. We've worked all week on rotating on defense and fighting through screens. These guys could be a handful for us on defense which is not our strongest commodity in the first place. They also rebound well so we need everyone going to the boards. They won their last game on the road against a suddenly flagging Campbell team.

In the first 10 minutes they are doing a great job of climbing all over our backs for rebounds at both ends of the court, and chasing them around in motion has resulted in 8 team fouls and Woods has picked up his second and I've gotten T'd. We've stayed within 1 point of them, but now that we are forced to go zone it could get ugly.

Somehow we survive their domination of the boards and our early foul trouble to take a 35-34 lead into the locker room. For the first time all season our 1-3-1 is having a positive effect, disrupting their game plan offensively. We also just pick up one more foul after the technical. Offensively they are having a really tough time stopping Brown and we actually have been making an effort to get the ball to him. We HAVE to get better rebounding in the 2nd half though, because they undoubtedly will eventually figure out our zone.

At 2:41 and the final media timeout we have the ball and a 5 point lead. Now to try to bring it home. Lemeke hits a pair of freethrows at :48 to make it a 3 possession lead. They hit a 3 with :12 to cut it to one after Lemeke misses the front end of a 1 and 1. he's fouled again at :08. here we go again. He hits them both and with only 2 fouls we aren't going to let them shoot. The strategy works and they aren't able to get a shot off. The road win moves us ahead of the Chanticleers in the standings.

We rebound a little better in the 2nd half (27-34, 7-11). We shot well most of the game, but got stuck on a number down the stretch. The big key to this game though was the success of our 1-3-1 zone which frustrated their offense and forced 22 turnovers.

Woods had 19, Brown added 13 although we kinda forgot to get him the ball in the 2nd half, and Lemeke had 10

Final: GW 66 CC 63

[Wayne23]

Whew!

[CoachC]

Feb 5 Presbyterian got upended on the road last night by Winthrop, while High Point won again at Liberty at at 10-0 are running away with the league. We are in sole possession of 6th.

[jksander]

They can't hang on to the basketball, can't play defense, shoot the ball and rebound only on occasion. Even though 7 of the 9 guys I'm playing have steal ratings over 5, we never get any. Other than that, we look like contenders for the national championship!

Sounds like Bob Knight's kind of brutal honesty, only he'd have peppered it with f-bombs and thrown chairs