Bethel

Off to Bethel for our first road game of the new decade. This is one of the things that I like about our league, that we can drive in our own cars to get to games. It was like a ten minutes trip at the most. Makes me think I'm going to get home at a reasonable hour, but that is never the case.

Once again, we started off pretty slow. Part of it was turnovers and the other part was settling for too many threes. You just can't do that on the road and expect to win. I believe we had double figure turnovers and also went 3-15 from three in the first half. We were down by eight with both Carl Hipp and Ray Brown playing minimal minutes because of foul trouble. Another problem we were having was trying to make plays on our first catch. It's been a problem for us all year and we have to make that adjustment as time goes on. Hopefully, we can.

The second half started off with a bang as we got right back into the game with seven straight points to start the half. Play was pretty even for probably the next eight minutes and then we went on a little spurt to put ourselves up by the 7 to 9 range for a couple of minutes. We had a seven point lead and had turnovers on two straight transition plays. Guys were trying to make the knockout punch with one play instead of wearing Bethel out with body shots. Those body shots take their toll the last four minutes of the game.

Bethel ended up creeping back because of a couple of mistakes on the offensive and defensive end. We executed a great out of bounds play and just couldn't hang onto the ball, Bethel comes down and hits a 3. Levi Wenrich made some clutch free throws down the stretch for us and got us up five with about 15 seconds left. After a Bethel timeout, we told the guys to give them a layup but no 3's. Sure enough, we gave up another 3 and was up two with 3.0 seconds left. We drew up the inbounds play during the timeout and once again executed it. We threw a catchable pass that slipped out of our hands right underneath their basket. A Bethel play was falling down when he had his hands on it and threw it out towards the perimeter as time expired.

This one was exactly a Monet but we'll take it. It showed us that we can win while playing sloppy. Obviously, we don't want that as a coaching staff but a win is a win. That is twice that we have won with 20+ turnovers (Wheaton was the other).

We take on St. Mary's tomorrow to get above .500 in league play. They gave us trouble last year because of their quickness. Hopefully, our guys can make that adjustment tomorrow and play hard and smart for 40 minutes.