eagle rock final

SoCal High School & Prep Report

Eagle Rock Tourney: Gardena Beats
Taft in Final--(January 2, 1998)

There were few reports of this tournament outside of a couple of box scores in the some local papers, and some small blurbs in a couple of other dailies. And we don't know of anyone who actually attended this one, except for some of the coaches, and we haven't heard from them yet. We don't know why the media blacked this one out, except that it was, for all practical purposes, a City Section exhibition, consisting of mostly 3A teams, and one of the most dominant 3A players, Gil Arenas was over at Birmingham putting on his own shooting drills. Maybe the media figured that they didn't need to cover it. Who knows.

In any event there was some pretty good basketball being played and in the Championship game, as Gardena beat Taft 56-51. The Mohicans traild 17-15 at the end of the first quarter, but then outscored Taft in the second quarter 22-10 to jump out to 10 point halftime lead, with the score at 37-27. And even though Taft's Amir Bar-Netzer and Harold Shevlin, both outstanding players who deserve a better supporting cast, did their best, outscoring Gardena in each of the next two quarters, 13-11 in the third and 11-7 in the fourth, it was just not enough, and Gardena hung on for the title win.

In addition to Ba-Netzers 11 and Shevlin's 23 game high points, boykins had 9, Alvarez 6 and Levy had 2. For Gardena, Quincy Brown had 15 points, Aaron Williams had 19, and otheres scoring were Allen with 6, Prince with 6, Knight 8, and Harper with only 2 points. Even though Harper barely scored, we were told that he was named the Tournament MVP, mostly based on his defensive play, which was pretty impressive.

In the third place game, North Hollywood finally managed to pull one out of the fir, beating University 71 to 68. Dejon Lee scored 23 points and Keron Wilkerson had 19 for the Huskies. North Hollywood led at the end of the first quarter 19-15, and extended it's lead to 6 points at the half with the score 37-31 at the end of two quarters. In the third quarter, NoHo was slightly outscored 23-21, and then again "lost" the fourth quarter by 1 point, 13-14, but still grabbed the win. Others scoring for NoHo were Johnson with 6, C. Wright with 10, McKissick with 1, Greg Roller with 2, Hicks with 6, and Eric Roller with 4. For University Hassan Trotter had 25 points and Raoul Quiveors had 11, while Angelo Dawson had 6 points, Gerald Kirk 14, and Kiarah Paydar had 3. Ferguson scored 8, and Guevara had 1.

In the fifth place game, Bell beat Poly 44-43 Abel Velarde had 18 for Bell in the win and was the only scorer in double figures for Bell. Ellis Richardson scored 13 for Poly and Word had 16.

In the seventh place game, Marshall beat Venice 76-59. Glen McGowan scored 21 points for Venice in the loss, while Foulay Saelor of Marshall had 26 points to lead all scorers

In the Consolation Championship, Garfield beat host Eagle Rock 70-69. For Garfield, Louis Armstrong had 10 points, and Rene Leos had 18, and Alex Romero had 21. High scorers for Eagle Rock were Alex Cabagnot with 22 points, Walter Sierra with 10, Jerome Rey with 10, and Daniel Lehman with 17 points. The loss dropped Eagle Rock to 4-9.