By Ximena Fagan
The Cooperative and Christian Learning junior varsity boys basketball teams played a nice close game at the Jaguars coliseum Tuesday in which both teams really had chances to show off their skills, but the CLC Eagles were able to win the match by two points, 30-28.
It was the same victory margin by which the Eagles had won the first meeting of the two teams over a month ago, a game that was decided in overtime. The higher score indicated both teams have improved. The score in the earlier overtime contest score was 20-18.
During the first quarter jaguar Luis Peredo and Eduardo Ustarez showed off their skills, with Peredo directing the offense from point guard and Ustarez scoring on some nice shots. The Jaguars took an early lead, but the Eagles caught up and the first quarter ended with Cooperative’s lead cut to 8-6. .
Luke Philips was one of the Eagles’ stars, helping his team to even the score at 14-14 by the end of the second quarter. The last few minutes of the quarter were the ones that really proved Phillips was a strong player for Christian Learning as he scored the final two baskets. .
The Eagles began losing control in the third quarter, scoring only a single basket, while SCCS scored ten points, and moved out to a 24-16 lead. Jaguar sixth grader Raul Valle began calling attention to himself with his fast running and accurate scoring. He scored six of the Jaguars points in the quarter.
In the last quarter, however, the Eagles sprang into action and turned the tables on the Jaguars, outscoring them 14-4, with key baskets by Phillips and Claudio Sandoval, who scored the deciding basket with a minute to go. However, the Jaguars had their chances to tie it up, getting off three shots in the closing seconds, but all three missed.
During the first quarter jaguar Luis Peredo and Eduardo Ustarez showed off their skills, with Peredo directing the offense from point guard and Ustarez scoring on some nice shots. The Jaguars took an early lead, but the Eagles caught up and the first quarter ended with Cooperative’s lead cut to 8-6. .
Luke Philips was one of the Eagles’ stars, helping his team to even the score at 14-14 by the end of the second quarter. The last few minutes of the quarter were the ones that really proved Phillips was a strong player for Christian Learning as he scored the final two baskets. .
The Eagles began losing control in the third quarter, scoring only a single basket, while SCCS scored ten points, and moved out to a 24-16 lead. Jaguar sixth grader Raul Valle began calling attention to himself with his fast running and accurate scoring. He scored six of the Jaguars points in the quarter.
In the last quarter, however, the Eagles sprang into action and turned the tables on the Jaguars, outscoring them 14-4, with key baskets by Phillips and Claudio Sandoval, who scored the deciding basket with a minute to go. However, the Jaguars had their chances to tie it up, getting off three shots in the closing seconds, but all three missed.
The game was the Bolivian coaching debut for Jaguar dean Kenneth Davis, filling in for coach Seth Gibson, who was ill. His team may have lost, but the effort and spirit put into the game was as great as any.
(Ximena Fagan is the co-managing editor of the website at Cooperative, where she is a junior.)
(Ximena Fagan is the co-managing editor of the website at Cooperative, where she is a junior.)
Yikes! Another 100 pointer as Knights destroy Griffins
Questions abound after the Cambridge
For example, if this were prize fight – a boxing match – would the referee have stopped it? Should someone have stopped it?
This was the second hundred-point walloping of the year. Are we going to see more? Should we?
Should younger children be barred from watching such games because of the level of gratuitous violence, although, truth to tell, there weren’t many children, or adults, who stayed to the end of this one. Even International athletic director Eli Vilar was gone by halftime.
Were the Knights simply out to avenge the humiliation International had heaped upon the Cambridge girls JV in the previous game, which the Griffins had won by the lopsided score of 58-6 moments before the boys teams took the court? Is this kind of vengeance for distressed damsels chivalric? Or was it more a massacre along the lines of Custer at the Little Big Horn?
Only time will tell. What is perhaps clear is that the League has reached the level of proficiency in the game of basketball where a team that is inexperienced, or ill-prepared, can really get the stuffing knocked out of it in a way that could do lasting damage to its self-esteem, and in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the earlier years of the League when 12 points was considered a high score.
Or, on the other hand, might the losers, following Nietzsche’s dictum that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, be fortified by these shellackings and will emerge the stronger for it?
The play-by-play action in this bloodbath seems hardly worth reporting. Cambridge simply ran amok from the opening tip-off, scoring thirty points in the opening period, and 25 in the second, to establish a 55-4 halftime lead.
International was through scoring at this point for the afternoon, but Cambridge was not, tallying 45 more points in the second half. Benchwarmer Marco Ovando´s basket in the closing moments clicked the scoreboard to 00. It only displays two digits and this was as close as it could come to registering 100.
Seven of the nine players Cambridge had dressed for the game scored 20 points or more – Percy Vidal (24), Horacio Morales (21) and Masayoshi Ueno (20). Santiago Hurtado, normally one of Cambridge’s top scorers, was held to a paltry 11 points, but did have the games only three-pointer. Jose Candia had 12, Marco Ovando 6, and Eduardo Sandoval 4.
Juan Nuñez got all four of International’s points, two of them on second quarter free throws.
There were some interesting little anomalies. One of the two players who didn’t score for Cambridge was Nando Boller, the starting right guard, who had scored in every other game the Cambridge team has played this year.
The 100-point total is not a League record, though it is a boys record. The overall honor still belongs to the Cooperative girls varsity, which scored 102 points in its second game against International this year. And the final two points they scored, once considered tantamount to pouring water on a drowning woman, now loom large in retrospect.
Despite its 0-6 record this year, morale apparently continues at a fairly high level at International, which had 12 players dressed for the game, all of whom played.
And if the game offered any hope for the future for Cambridge opponents at the JV level, it was the fact that all of the Cambridge players dressed for the game were eighth graders who will move up to the varsity level next year. The exceptions were Boller and Hurtado, who are seventh graders.
In the final analysis, the insight gained from Tuesday’s wipe-out of International by Cambridge, it is that the Knights are ready to rumble in the playoffs. In the first round, the Griffins face the dismaying prospect of playing Cambridge.—again,
Which raises yet another question – why bother?
