birmingham semis

SoCal High School & Prep Report

Birmingham Tourney: Monday's Semifinals--(December 30, 1997)

This tournament once again demonstrated the wide gulch which sometimes exists between not only varsity teams, but also between the varsity and the jv players. We question whether this should truly be called a "tournament", because it does not look like there's any team here which can really challenge Grant and Gilbert Arenas. Gilbert did it again, breaking the 30 point barrier. Here are Monday's Semifinal results. We'll try to get the finals, which are being played tonight at Birmingham up here sometime tomorrow.

Grant 76, Monroe 61--Gilbert Arenas scored 32 points for the Lancers (7-5) in the semifinals of the Birmingham tournament. Not a whole lot to say about the game, except that Monroe's game Saturday against the Birmingham JV's did absolutely nothing to prepare them for Gilbert's fine shooting, dishing, driving and dribbling. While Monroe initially jumped out to a two point lead, 19-17 at the end of the first quarter, Grant outscored them 21-7 in the second. In addition to Arenas' 32 points (which actually improves his 30 point per game average only slightly), Rhashad Winston scored 3, Adir Levy, who seems to be in a shooting slump the last few games, scored 4, Mike Yildiz had 6, Daniel Tarr had 2, Justin Buttikofer had 2, Krishna Evans scored 15, LaRon Harris score 7, and Hans Hoehn had 5. In fact Grant had only two players who did not score in this one. Monroe had three players in double figures, Ritter with 13, Marshall with 14, and Bush with 10.

LACES 61, SOCES 60

This was a game which saw LACES (which for those of you who don't know stands for Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies) almost blow a 12 point halftime lead. LACES outscored SOCES (which is the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies--but which is not located in Sherman Oaks, but instead is in Reseda. . . only in the LAUSD, which stands for Large And Underfunded School District) 11-8 in the first and 23-13 in the second. But SOCES managed a furious comeback, scoring 19 and 20 points in each of the last two quarters, coming up short only in the last seconds. Neither of these teams has a stellar record, but LACES improved to 3-3, while SOCES dropped to 1-8. 'Nuff said.

Birmingham JV 38, Granada Hills 60

This was truly a "consolation" game. Everybody deserved to be consoled a bit. It was yet another example of why the Birmingham JV's should not be in this tournament, and why Birmingham should have tried a bit harder to get a varsity team from somewhere, anywhere. Surely there was some school somewhere not playing a tournament. Bus 'em in; fly them in for free. This time Granada Hills got to beat up on the kids, pounding them 60-38. Remember Saturday's game against Monroe, which beat the Birmingham JV 68-31, and outscoring them 26-9 in the third quarter? Well, the third quarter in this game was, proportionally speaking even worse: 11 to 2; and the first quarter was not much better--Granada Hills outscored the JV's 15-5. The kids did come back a bit in the fourth quarter, scoring 20 points (a record?) but by then the game was long since over.

Birmingham (Varsity) 77, Verdugo Hills 38

Stanley Fletcher scored a triple double, with 23 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists, as Birmingham hammered Verdugo Hills. The number 38 seemed to be a popular number to lose by (see the Birmingham JV score), and Verdugo Hills demonstrated that their basketball team is not destined to finish much higher than did their football team this year. The first two quarters were bleak for Verdugo, who scored only 8 in each; in fact Verdugo had only two quarters in which they broke ten, and in the third quarter they did that only by two points, scoring 12; in the fourth they only managed 10 points. Verdugo had only 1 player, Moore, in double figures with 11 points. For Birmingham, Hassankhail had 9, Riley had 10 points and 7 assists, Salas had 6 points. Others scoring for Birmingham were Evans with 22 points, Kopulsky with 3, and Welden with 4.