Napa, Vintage basketball teams pick up blowout victories on Wine Valley tournaments second day
By Kyle Foster
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
In the second day of the Wine Valley tournament both Napa and Vintage picked up wins.
Vintage 69 Kennedy 25
The Crushers picked up their first win of the season against an athletic Kennedy team.
“It feels good,” Vintage coach Rob Johnson said of getting the first win under their belt. “Really good for the guys to get that first win and build up more confidence and let us know that we can get those shots to drop and work together as a team.”
In the first quarter things were tight, but then all of a sudden in the second quarter something clicked for Vintage (1-2).
“Reading more, finding the open guy, taking what comes to us,” Johnson explained as to what happened for his team to gain a large advantage. “We’re a smart team, we’ve just got to play smart. That’s all it is.”
The Crushers were lead by Blake Murray who had 18 points and two rebounds. Jared Rendon and Logan Nothmann also pitched in 10 points apiece.
“Blake is awesome. His energy is amazing. Jared is our guy, so we really ride his back. So I think he’s got a lot of internal pressure on himself to be great because he can be, and I just give him all the confidence in the world. Both of those guys are going to be leading this team a lot,” Johnson said of his teams leading scorers on the night.
Vintage will face Bethel at 2 p.m. on the final day of the tournament before hosting Pioneer-Woodland on Tuesday.
Napa 67 Pioneer 44
It was simply a night where Napa showed how dominant of team they can be.
The Grizzlies (3-2) jumped out to a massive advantage in the beginning of the game because, for the most part, every shot the took was finding the bottom of the net.
“We were shooting it really well and moving the ball and getting some wide open looks and you still gotta make them though even if you’re wide open,” Napa coach Zack Cook said of the hot start. “It was a good night shooting.”
Another thing that helped was the efforts of Brayden Greenlee and Stephen Blume.
Greenlee ended the night with 27 points, most of which came from beyond the arc.
“That was great to see,” Cook explained. “We’ve been waiting for him to kinda bust out. We know he’s a very talented scorer, got a nose from the basket, and it was great to see him just cut loose tonight and knock down all those threes and hopefully it’ll just get the ball rolling for him the rest of the year.”
“I was just feeling it tonight,” the sophomore guard said. “My teammates were giving me the ball, so I just kept shooting and was feeling it all night.”
Blume ended the night with 17 points, and was the main reason Napa asserted their dominance at the start of the contest.
Napa will face El Capitan of Merced to end the Wine Valley tournament at 3:30 p.m. and then they’ll host Vacaville on Tuesday night.
