By Stephen Henderson
The Patrick County High School Cougar boys’ basketball team traveled to Christiansburg last Wednesday night to compete in the opening round of Conference 32 action and lost to a strong Christiansburg team 70-48.
The Cougars started the game “hot, like we wanted to,” said Coach Andrew Terry. “We were up 9-0 at the start of the game.”
At that point, the Demons called a time-out; when the game continued, Demon player Cole Christian hit five three-pointers in a row.
“That was the game-changer for us,” Terry said. “We went from up nine to down five at the end of the quarter,” he said.
The Demons were hot and kept scoring. “We didn’t do a very good job defensively after the first quarter,” Terry said. The score at the half was 40-22 at the half.
“Christiansburg got a lot of easy stuff early on in the second quarter, and we didn’t,” he added.
According to Terry, PC never got into a good flow offensively and never ran any plays consistently. “We were spotty and tried to run up and down with them, and that’s just not something we could do,” he said.
Leading scorer was Seth Scott with 10 points, including five rebounds. Hunter Lawless had eight and Brandon Hubbard added seven.
The Cougars ended their season with a 2-20 record.
Looking to next season, Terry sees a bright future for the Cougars. “We are young and we have stuff to look forward to next year,” he said. “I am really excited about next year. We have several big scorers returning including Seth Scott, Hunter Lawless and Brandon Hubbard as well as freshman point guard Frankie LaComa, who will be a sophomore next year,” Terry said.
“We have our four big guys coming back—Matt Amos, Zach Strole, RJ Hagwood as well as Seth. We will have size, we will have speed and we will have shooting,” Terry said.
Only two seniors will be graduating this year, including Kody Dillard and Landon Gunter.
Terry said that he hoped to give the team about three weeks off before they start some conditioning for next season.
“We’ll get right back on it—we have a lot of work to do. I feel like the guys will want to work. They have talked to me non-stop about what will be doing in the off-season already. They are ready to get back in there and work as soon as possible,” he said. “We’ll be working around baseball and football to get them as much time as we can in the gym.”
