Varsity Boys Basketball fell to The King’s Academy 58-42 during its sportsmanship game on Thursday, Nov. 16. While MVHS and TKA were initially neck and neck, ending the first quarter 11-11, TKA eventually pushed forward to take the lead despite the Matadors’ efforts to catch up.
Senior and point guard Matthew Lau knew that going into the game, the team would need to work on different skills such as communication and avoiding turnovers, considering their previous scrimmage against Hillsdale High School did not go as they hoped.
Junior and point guard Ninad Suresh echoes this sentiment, stating that TKA also put up a tough fight when it played against MVHS last year, so the team had a strong sense of the skill level they were up against.
“Going into the game, King’s Academy is obviously a good team since last year they performed well and placed top 10 in CCS,” Suresh said. “Beating them would be tough. We knew we’d have to be good. We knew we wouldn’t really have a chance, but we just came in with the mentality to play hard to get better.”
Junior and guard Stanley Du agrees the team was lacking cohesion and communication as it went into the game, but he remains hopeful for the rest of the season.
“It’s going to be a rough start because we just lost two starters and we have a bunch of new people coming in,” Du said. “So we have to figure out how to play together. But I think as the season goes on, we’ll get together and we’ll have an even better season than last season.”
Lau says the team improved on being on the same page as well as reducing the amount of turnovers, especially in the first half. However, he says there was still a lot of room for improvement on both the defensive and offensive sides.
“On the offensive end, I feel like we could’ve done a lot better in terms of how many guys tag the basket, score and do what they need to do,” Lau said. “Defensively, they’re bigger, they’re stronger — we’re always gonna be the smallest team on the court throughout the season. We need to employ tactics like boxing out, being aggressive and not letting teams dominate us.”
Du also says the team’s performance declined in the second half, stating that while the team had good spirit throughout the game, it didn’t have enough gas to push through the game.
“We let them attack way too much and we had to force them into outside shots a lot more on the defensive end,” Du said. “Offensively, we had to move the ball better and get better spacing, that’s why we weren’t able to get many shots up.”
While Suresh felt the team kept up the pressure in defense and had many steals and turnovers, the team could have also improved in areas like rebounds and keeping possession of the ball.
Lau says he was happy that, regardless of the outcome, each player took the game as an opportunity to improve since it was just the start of the season and didn’t hold as much weight.
“I’d say we had fun, guys are smiling on the court,” Lau said. “At the end of the day, as long as we have fun, that’s the main goal. Honestly, we just learn from here and keep going.”
