Santa Rosa forces turnovers early and down the stretch to edge Vintage in defensive battle
By Kyle Foster
Twitter/X: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
In basketball, every possession matters. You can do many things right but if you don’t take advantage of every possession, it can cost you the game.
This was the case on Tuesday night at Crusher Gym, as Santa Rosa beat Vintage, 57-46, in a defensive slugfest in which it was hard to get anything going on offense.
The Panthers (4-1) gained the edge by forcing a large number of turnovers in the first half. This also helped them extend their lead in the second quarter, where they gained some breathing room.
“We’re lacking awareness at times,” Vintage head coach Ben Gongora said of the turnovers that plagued his team all night. “I tell the kids all the time, ‘This is only bad if we don’t learn from it.’ Some are progressing. Some aren’t progressing as quickly as others. But I don’t mind a mistake. I mind repeated mistakes. I mind repeated mistakes. If you’re making the same mistake, we gotta do better.”
Santa Rosa also finished the game on a 7-0 run, when it was just a four-point game. This also was fueled by turnovers.
The Panthers also had a trio of double-digit scorers, which helped them get the upper hand when the game was over.
Finishing with a team-high of 14 points in the game was Weston Mohr. Gabe Airoldi finished the game with 12 points also helping the Panthers. Rounding out the trio was Jacob Nichols who had 10 in the game.
Vintage (0-6) kept themselves in the game with some good defense throughout the game. Throughout the contest, the Crushers used a bunch of different defenses to keep Santa Rosa guessing.
“We knew that if we were going to stay in the game, it was going to have to come on the defensive end,” Gongora explained of the importance of defense in the game and how it could keep them in it. “So some of the schemes we’re doing, one of them we call cat and mouse or bluff and recover going back and forth, that seemed to work, and it kind of threw Santa Rosa off their rhythm. There’s a difference between giving up a three and giving up a rhythm three. We want to give up non-rhythm threes. We don’t want to give up threes where the shooter is in rhythm and I thought we did a really good job in the first half of that.”
When they were finally able to get going on offense, it came off of driving the basket and getting fouled.
The main player who benefited from this was Adar Yildiz. The junior forward finished with a game-leading 16 points and 7 rebounds. On top of all of this, Yildiz was able to score evenly in both halves of the game, where he had 8 points in each. Yildiz was also perfect from the free-throw line making all four of his shots from there.
So far this season, Yildiz has also been the one to carry the offensive attack as he has been the Crushers leading scorer in every game.
“Adar is relentless,” Gongora added. “Adar is a past winner of an award we give out called the touToughestusher award. Adar wins the floor burner award, meaning the person who dives on the floor the most. Adar is getting the most rebounds. He’s not the tallest, nor the second tallest, nor the third tallest, nor the fourth tallest on the court, yet he figures out a way to get these rebounds. Adar has been awesome. Adar has been the leading scorer in the last five games for us. He’s just really starting to come into his own, and I can’t wait till he gets we get our reinforcements.”
Finishing as the second-highest scorer for Vintage in the game was Anthony Willmert. He scored 11 points in the contest and brought in 3 rebounds. He tallied 6 points in the first half of the game. He also made one three-pointer and both of his shots from the free-throw line.
“Well, the things that Anthony did tonight are no different than what he does in practice,” Gongora pointed out. “So I think for us, we like him to be more assertive. We believe in him as a coaching staff, we want him to believe in himself. So I was really happy to see him do the things he did today.”
Others rounding out the scoring for the Crushers were Danny Ward (6 points, 7 rebounds), Parker Dahl (4 points, 1 rebound), Jonah Harris (4 points), Dominic Oram (3 points, 1 rebound), and Evan Rosette (2 points).
One reason Vintage is off to a slow start is injuries that have made people play out of their roles. In this game, the Crushers were without four players too.
But if there is one silver lining, it’s that this has been a time to develop and teach this young team until they get their guys back.
“We broke down this season into three seasons,” Gongora said of the philosophy of growing the team of young players early on. “Right now, we’re in season two. (The) first season was (the) first day of practice to Thanksgiving, and the next season was Thanksgiving to Christmas, and then everything is gearing towards league (play).
“We’re in season two of our season,” the coach continued. “We’re gearing up. We’ve got one more game on Saturday, and then we’re gearing up for our post-Christmas run, and I think we have over 20 games thereafter, so that will be our season three. Everything we’re doing now is to get better and learn from so the focus has not been on winning as much as it’s been on competing and improving and learning from these experiences.”
Vintage will play their final non-league game for a while on Saturday at 3 pm when they visit Concord.
