Men take win in physical battle

By PETER HILLS

The Saints’ defense shined in Wednesday’s physical win against Linn-Benton 66-44.

“I was really pleased with our intensity, the way we started out the game. We came out and we were focused. I thought our match-ups were good. We were able to cause a lot of problems in that first half,” said coach Rob Nielson.

“The second half was kind of a sloppy played game, neither team was very focused and we just kind of went through the motions, and so did they,” said Nielson.

The Saints’ defense is what held them to only 44 points.

“We’ve met all of our goals as far as our defense, how they shot, points scored, rebounds, etc. It was probably one of our best overall defensive games,” said Nielson.

The Saints created a commanding 22-point lead at halftime, but they weren’t ready to just cruise through the rest of the game.

“We had to keep the lead, keep building. There’s a lot of games where we were up by a lot and we relaxed and they came back up, and we’d end up going into overtime,” said forward/center Kaylone Riley.

Last Saturday, they found themselves in an overtime situation when they beat Lane 94-86.

Lane took an early lead, up 12-0, and the Saints didn’t score in the first five minutes of the game. “We just weren’t mentally ready to play. That was probably my fault for not getting them ready. We had some good wins, so I think we kind of took things easy and we weren’t ready to play,” said Nielson. “They came out and jumped on us. We came back, we were lucky to fight back and be down like four or five at halftime. We battled back and forth in the second half and took the lead, They were up three and Lane hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer with half a second to put it into overtime. Our free throw shooting was bad: we were like 8-24 in the second half. We missed a whole bunch of free throws and in overtime we were 9-9. They focused in and made some shots.”

Riley had five blocked shots and Jake Glisson had 21 points and nine rebounds against Lane.

They outshot them 15-7 in the five-minute overtime period.

“We practice five-minute games, so they’re used to playing that, and we’ve had some luck in overtime, so it’s a confident thing. They are pretty confident going into that situation and they’ve done it before. We’d rather not go into overtime,” said Nielson.

The Saints are 5-0 making them first in the Southern Region, “We are where we want to be right now, it’s a pretty balanced league, there’s been a lot of upsets,” said Nielson.

The Saints will head out to Roseburg this weekend to take on the Umpqua Timbermen, 1-4 and 4-14 overall.

“They hadn’t won a league game, now they have and they are confident. It’s a tough trip, it’s a three hour drive so we’ll have to be ready to go, because that coach has a desire to beat us. People are out shooting for us so we got to be ready to play for them, every night,”said Nielson.