College Park leads DVAL near halfway point

On Friday night the Red Devils came to The Nest and gave us a test as we were only up 4 points midway through the 3rd quarter. A large part of Mt. Diablo’s attack was crashing the offensive glass. Once we were able to do a better job securing the defensive rebounds it led to our transition game opening up and us converting easier baskets. We were also able to figure out their pressure defense and would clear out and let our ballhandlers attack in space. Sophomore Dre Sunga came up huge scoring 11 second half points. Raazhel Watkins also had a big night scoring 25 points and getting us baskets when we needed them.

Pleasant Grove 67, College Park 44 (NONLEAGUE)

Saturday morning we traveled out to Sheldon High School to participate in the Adidas Showcase. Maybe we were still asleep at tipoff as we started the game down 10-0. We quickly turned things around, going on a run of our own and only allowing 4 points in the 2nd quarter to trail by 2 at halftime. Pleasant Grove got hot in the 3rd quarter and outscored us by 9, although we were still in the game. The 4th quarter is where the wheels came off and we couldn’t manage to keep up, being outscored by 12 points. We had a pretty good effort defensively in the first half only allowing 21 points total. In the second half, our defensive effort seemed to be coincide with our shots going in or not, and we gave up 43 second half points.  This was another winnable game for us against a solid team. I told our players after the game that our defense can’t tied to our shot making, our defensive effort is the thing that we can control.