Basketball recap boys game #6

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Saints Second Half Surge Comes up Short
In the last regular season game of 2017, our Saints took on the Christ Cougars from North St. Paul in front of the home crowd on Friday. Going into the game, the entire team embraced the challenge of playing one of the better teams in our conference. After years of rebuilding, it is neat to see that Christ Lutheran is having an awesome season, coming into this game with an impressive 4-1 record, with their only loss coming against Bloomington.
Right from the outset, the Cougars unique, unorthodox style of defense confused and stymied our young basketball team.Their defensive game plan was a smart strategy, which consisted of man-to-man pressure against our point guard, while playing a zone on the interior against our posts. This kind of defense thwarted our usual offensive sets and forced our young team to improvise, which led to an ugly offensive first half for our Saints.
After both a stern speech and some words of encouragement from the coaches at halftime, our boys attacked the Cougars’ defense much better in the second half. The key to our second half offensive success was swinging the ball to one of our open wings to drive the ball, while having the opposite wing cut hard into the open spot in the middle of the defense. The second half aggressiveness of our starting wings, sixth grader Luke (4 points) and seventh grader Reese (3 points), enabled our Saints to put up 17 points after halftime. While this second half surge was awesome to watch, our first half total of only three points led to the disparity on the final scoreboard. Even though our Saints dropped their sixth straight game (final score: 20-38), I think it is pretty clear that our boys are improving and growing well as a team. As we continue to learn the fundamentals of basketball, I keep stressing to the boys that we are extremely close to getting that first elusive win as an A team. If our boys continue to stay the course, our first win will be coming very quickly!
Please note that we will only have practice on Thursday (Dec. 21) during this last week before Christmas break. It is my prayer that everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

By: Travis Koester

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