best of summer changes (Wednesday)

SoCalHoops High School & Prep News

Best of Summer Tournament
Roster & Schedule Changes & More--(July 22, 1998)

As the teams and players float in an out here's what's different from the Wednesday and Thursday schedules we've already posted for the Best of Summer Tourney:

Pump & Run I: The usual roster which lists Mike Dunleavy, Jason Morrisett, Gil Arenas, Aaron Abrams, Cayce Cook, Joe Shipp, Cameron Carr, Armand Thomas, Bo Segeberg and Eric Rohwer was basically meaningless yesterday.

Only three of the P&R I guys were there: Gil Arenas, Aaron Abrams and Armand Thomas.

Gilbert played sparingly and not at all well during the first half of Pump & Run's game with San Diego Future Stars, and sat out the entire second half. We talked a bit with Gil and his dad, and Gil is getting to the point where burnout might be a factor. Not a big surprise, since he's probably been playing two or three games per day for the last month and a half, and we expect that he'll take the next few days off and may not play until the weekend when the tournament goes into single elimination. Then again, he might just show up again today when P& R I was scheduled to play Brewster Heights at 9:00 a.m. this morning.

As of yesterday, here's who showed up for P&R I besides Gilbert, Aaron and Armond:

BJ Grove (6'-11" Sr. C) from Pennsylvania, who is a big strong guy, who never got off the ground, and rarely though "dunk"- in fact we didn't see him dunk, and he barely got above the rim. But other than that, he was very effective in the blocks, and sure can take up space.

Lance Buoncristiani (5'-8" Sr. PG) from Reno Galena High. Boy, this guy gets around. Last week he was playing for Bob Gottlieb's BWBA team, the week before he was freelancing, but yesterday he played for Pump & Run and didn't play for his high school team, which showed up as "Galena High Five" with their regular high school coach, but consisted basically of sophomores and juniors. Lance was doing his usual buzzing and moving, not much driving to the hole yesterday, but a lot of fine perimeter passing.

Johnny Hardwick (6'-9" Sr. F/C) from Manual Arts, also played for Pump & Run I yesterday, and we'll be brutally honest about this one: He played some of the worst basketball we've ever seen him play. When he wasn't standing around watching everyone else, he was not rebounding, and couldn't make a shot to save his life, missing some really point blank shots from literally right next to the rim. Is the burnout hitting everyone at once. This performance was from a guy who was on the All-Star team at West Coast All-Stars, and who usually plays pretty solid ball. Oh, well, there's always tomorrow.

Pump & Run I also had James Wright (5'-10" Sr. PG) from Manual Arts as well, and he played reasonably well too, hitting a couple of nice outside shots, and distributing the ball well, and more importantly, playing very good defense, which was a rarity yesterday.

Pump & Run I beat the San Diego Future Stars yesterday, and they did it in spite of themselves. One of the coaches sitting next to us commented on the game, and said that the P&R team was getting an "old fashioned ass-kicking" and he was right. The San Diego team, which consists of a bunch of guys who are all basically guards (not a guy bigger than 6'-5", and there's only one of him) played very good fundamental basketball, and but for the last few minutes of the game, Pump & Run I trailed the whole time, sometimes by as many as 15 points.

But ultimately Aaron Abrams stepped up when he needed to and started to drive and hit, and Armand and James Wright moved things along, so that the Pump team just squeaked by.

More changes: QBL looks like they're out. We're not sure why, but when Jason Kapono and the group showed up last night, they didn't play. We're told that they'll just be playing in "exhibition" games, and that now Inglewood, playing as the Sentinels, will play in the QBL spot.

Pump & run has also added an "International" team to the tournament. We don't know any of these guys, and haven't seen them play, but here's who's listed as being on the team:

Soemunchir Oddson (6'-5" ?? PG)
Darko Radulovic (6'-4" ?? PG)
Michael Belostennyi (6'-9" ?? C)
Bart Zuiderunjk (6'-8" ?? F)
Riels Vorenmont (6'-7" ?? G/F)
Adnon Cussell (6'-6" ?? G/F)

There are more changes and we'll get to them in another report. As soon as we find out about these international guys, we'll post it up.