Dec. 29
Had another great breakfast at Jack's and then headed to shoot-around at Cal Lu. Coach Whitmore ripped into the guys quite a bit to try and get some intensity for the game. Just a little reminder that we are playing the 8th ranked Wheaton Thunder in a couple of hours.
After shoot-around we had a little banquet with a little lunch. All the teams were there along with a partner from Thrivent Financial, the main sponsor for the tournament. It was a pretty good meal but most of us were still full from breakfast already. We got to head back to the hotel for a little R & R before the game.
We were able to watch the Monmouth vs. Cal Lutheran game before ours. It was a really good first half. Monmouth played their rearends off and were up at 4 at the break. Cal Lutheran then come out with some fire in the second half and beat Monmouth by double figures. I really enjoyed watching Monmouth play because they played so hard for the whole game. They were clearly outmatched when it came to ability though. Coach Mark Vershaw (of Wisconsin fame) did a great job, now he just needs better players.
After watching most of the previous game, our game got rolling in a hurry. Both teams came out with a lot of intensity. Right from the get go, I believe Wheaton knew they had a game on their hands. We pretty much punched them in the mouth at the beginning and had them on their heels. It was exactly how we wanted to come out.
We were up by as many as 12 points in the second half and the guys were playing hard. Wheaton was ranked 8th for a reason and battled back to get the lead for a majority of the last couple of minutes. It was an impressive display by our guys. We didn't fold and battled against a very good basketball club. After missing an opportunity being down one we fouled their big guy with about eight seconds left. He missed both free throws and we brought the ball down the floor with no timeouts left. Ray Brown had it and was essentially triple teamed and passed it to Carl Hipp around the NBA 3pt arc. Carl took two dribbles and made a little running hook with 1.1 seconds left to put us up one. It was just how we drew it up, not really but lets pretend we did. After a Wheaton timeout they tried a Holy Mary pass and we picked it off for the win. Huge win for our program.
Dec. 29
After a great win we wanted to make sure the guys got plenty of rest for that night's showdown with the host Cal Lutheran. They certainly scared us a little with their runs they made against Monmouth. We knew we had to take away their two best perimeter players. Going into the locker room before the game, you could tell the guys had a different energy than before. It was clearly a different team.
We came out with a bang as Ray Brown hit three 3's early. Cal Lutheran didn't seem to ever recover. We were very physical with them and they didn't respond. That was surprising because they were very big and strong, clearly stronger than us. We just grinded away in the first half and ended up leading by 14 at the break. The second half was just the same and we never got much of a challenge from them. Our defensive intensity was fantastic. We didn't let up for a second. It was a first championship in a long time and hopefully one of many as time goes on.
Dec. 31
After getting a great tourney win we decided it would be best for our guys to get the day off. After checking into our hotel near LAX we headed to Hollywood Blvd to walk around and "see the stars." We even got our own freestyle rap, check it out at the bottom of the page.
After checking out the Blvd we went over to the movies and saw "Invictus." It was a very interesting movie that many of our guys didn't understand because they weren't old enough. Yes, they have heard of Apartheid but didn't know that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for a long time. The movie had a great story and it said a lot about how Mandela helped change a nation through rugby.
Here is the video...
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