St. John's

It's always interesting when St. John's comes to town. I get along with their coaches better than anyone else in the conference and we usually compete for a lot of the same recruits, so we naturally see each other a couple of times in a week. Plus, they always have a following because people are very loyal to their alma mater out here. A older fellow came to the game at 5:30pm looking for the jayvee game, we didn't start until 7:30pm. It was nice to see a pretty good amount of students at the game, we are still hoping for more, winning does that. Simple formula, winning = higher attendance.

This game matched up two of the better all around players in the league in our Ray Brown and SJU's Aaron Burtzel and they certainly didn't disappoint. They both played their rear ends off and battled until the last minute.

We got off to an early lead with two huge dunks by Ray and Carl Hipp. SJU, being the good team that they are, battled back to close the gap and eventually were down by four at the half, 44-40. We were led by Carl's 11 points, while Ray had nine and Jordan Schmidt finished with 8. SJU was led by Burtzel with 15. He is the leading candidate for player of the year for a reason.

The second half opened with a bang for us with a Noah Aguirre 3 and we never looked back. We pushed the lead to as many as 18 but Burtzel or Andy Burns kept on coming with tough shot after tough shot. We ended up holding SJU to 32% shooting in the second half and that was clearly the difference. We ended up winning 88-75 and were led by Brown's 26 to along with 13 boards and four assists. Carl had another good stat line with 21 points, 14 boards, and 5 blocks. Nick Carroll finished a great performance with 10 points and seven assists to go along with his tremendous defensive pressure. Jordan Schmidt was the fourth Piper in double figures with 10. For SJU Burtzel finished with 25 to go along with 11 boards and five assists. Andy Burns was only the other player in double figures for SJU with 13.

Right now we stand 9-5, 5-4 in the league. We play St. Thomas at Macalester on Monday. A win automatically puts us at a higher win total than last year. We also play at Augsburg on Wednesday, and then at Macalester on Saturday.