News - November, 2004

SSCC Patriots Fall Short

The Southern State Community College Patriots traveled to Sinclair in Dayton on Wed., Nov. 17 and fell short 96-90 to the Tartan pride. Sinclair scored first, making a couple of buckets before the Patriots could connect on their attempt. Sinclair jumped out to an early lead and didn’t let the Patriots come close in the first half. At one point the Patriots were down by 18. “We just didn’t show up to play. We let Sinclair manhandle us under the basket. We gave them too many second chance opportunities and they connected on all of them. I think we let them get 15 offensive rebounds in the first half,” commented SSCC men’s head basketball coach Jason Moberly. SSCC trailed going into halftime by a score of 51-43.

SSCC came out ready to play in the second half. The Patriots were determined to fight back and not allow Sinclair any easy shots. “We went in and discussed our defensive effort and we all agreed that things had to change for us in order to get back into the game,” said Moberly. The change helped the Patriots through the second half. With 3 minutes to go the Patriots were only down by 2 points. “We did an excellent job on pressuring the basketball and getting in the passing lanes during the second half. Mike King and Dexter Jones came up with some big steals to help bring us back into the game,” replied Moberly. The Patriots fought hard, but were unable to hang on falling short by a score of 96-90. “We know that we can score, we just have to play better defense to be successful. We can play great defense and we’ve proven that, it just has to be for 40 minutes. King played well again tonight along with Jones and Sean Inman. Anthony Beverly got into some early foul trouble, so he was limited at what he could do. We were short Erik Marting due to an injury that will take some time to heal, but we were able to put him on the court when we felt we had to,” stated Moberly.  The Patriots will hit the road over Thanksgiving weekend and play in a three day tournament at Columbus State.