Turnovers come back to haunt Crushers in season opening loss to Deer Valley
By Kyle Foster
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
The season opener didn’t go quite as planned for the Vintage boys basketball team on Saturday night as they lost to Deer Valley-Antioch 55-44.
It was a night where the Crushers (0-1) had too many turnovers to count.
“The pregame jitters like I said,” Vintage coach Rob Johnson said of the large amount of turnovers in their opener. “They wanna do things, they wanna force things to make things happen, but it’s just like in practice we’ve been going over (that) we’ve got to take our time, we’ve got to work it, you know swing it to the extra pass, so with that when they saw those minute openings they wanted to make something happen because we’ve got some guys out here who we lost a lot of seniors so they want to show that they belong here and we’ve got new guys coming in that want to prove those things, so just kinda figuring our roles out right now.”
Vintage was led by Josh McCormick, Blake Murray, and Grant Polk who all had seven points on the night.
Even though those three players led Vintage in scoring Johnson expects senior forward Jared Rendon to lead the team scoring throughout the season.
“I think Jared’s going to be our guy,” Johnson explained. “I think that Grant and Blake are definitely capable of doing a lot of great things. We have a really talented team we just couldn’t score today. I think that Josh McCormick coming off, Logan’s going to be great for us and be great for us. David (Brown) played pretty well, I like that kid. And it’s just the first game so I can overanalyze it as much as I can, but I just need to go home and shake it off and go back to the drawing board.”
Another thing that made Johnson happy was the fact that his team played good team defense against an athletic team.
“I thought our communication did really well in the first half,” Johnson said of his teams good effort on defense on the day. “We do have six returners, so they kind of understand and the other guys are good friends, so there’s a really good cohesiveness between the units. I think they feed off of each other well, so with that I thought that we were able to communicate that through. Now did we do what we wanted to do, no for the most part. But for me as a coach I can work on the negatives and just get better from there.”
The schedule doesn’t get any easier for Vintage as they will face El Capitan of Merced in the opening round of the Wine Valley Tournament next Thursday at 4 p.m.
“We’re okay with that,” Johnson said of having two tough games back-to-back to begin the season. “We’re excited to get going. We’re going to come back Monday ready to go, so in a way it’s kind of a wakeup call for us to look at what we did well, fix things we did wrong, and come back and have a great challenge next week.”
