Tough lessons for Crusaders
Published 10:17 pm Thursday, December 8, 2011
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First Baptist’s Matthew Snead tries to pass out of a Summit double-team during Thursday night’s Seven Cities Athletic Conference game at Summit Christian Academy in Yorktown. Summit beat the Crusaders 78-15.
YORKTOWN — Both Summit Christian basketball teams overmatched their First Baptist guests Thursday evening with the Lady Eagles beating the Lady Crusaders 47-13 and Summit winning the boys game 78-15.
First Baptist’s young boys hoops team knows it has plenty of lessons to learn this season. The Crusaders, with some eighth- and ninth-graders, along with some kids who haven’t played competitive basketball until going straight into varsity competition last week, played hard to the end against the Eagles, which is exactly what head coach Ron Carr wants.
“The one thing I ask as a coach is my guys have to give 110 percent. Don’t look at the scoreboard. You have to have heart to play hard,” Carr said.
“If you lose, you really haven’t lost anything. If you win, that’s excellent and we want to win with character. That’s what I’m looking forward to,” he said.
Summit, usually one of the top squads in the Seven Cities Athletic Conference, took the Crusaders out of the game with a full-court trap and height at the hoop.
The Eagles led 12-0 before Nathan Leiter scored with a drive and lay-up through traffic. Summit kept going to a 24-6 lead at the end of a quarter.
Summit’s 6-foot-3 center John David Sanderson, whose day job as an athlete is being one of the state’s best junior golfers, tallied 23 points by halftime and finished with 27 points and 17 boards.
Leiter, one of many varsity rookies, led the Crusaders with eight points.
First Baptist lost seven varsity players to graduation or transfer. Along with taking a new, inexperienced team, Carr wants to revamp a lot about Crusader basketball.
“We’re trying to build consistency at First Baptist, like (Summit) has here from their JJV and JV on up,” said Carr, who’s the fourth different head coach the Crusaders have had in five seasons.
The Crusaders are 0-4 but had closer contests in two of the games before Thursday night.
“They’re working hard. We’ve been going over plays and you can see the guys are getting it, but it’s hard because we’ve had such a short amount of time,” Carr said.
Summit didn’t pull away quite as quickly in the girls game, but the outcome was the same.
Janna Williams and Hannah Fagan made buckets to get First Baptist out to a 4-0 lead, but Summit blanked the Lady Crusaders (1-3) through the rest of the first half. Summit led 18-4 at halftime.
Williams finished as First Baptist’s top scorer with six points. Center Kelly Brown grabbed 11 rebounds.
Both Crusader basketball teams head out of state for their next contests, traveling to Ahoskie Christian for a doubleheader on Monday evening.