van nuys second day

SoCal High School & Prep Report

Van Nuys Tournament: The Rest of the
Tuesday Games Stories--(January 11, 1998)

Well, as you know, we put up some information on the first day of the Van Nuys Tournament, which started last Monday, January 5, and continued on Tuesday the 6th, and then on into Wednesday the 7th, when the finals were held.

And, also as promised, we actually did make it out to the Tuesday night games (which we couldn't write about due to some stuff which occurred. . . about which we've already written enough). And we got over to Van Nuys High on Tuesday night just in time to catch the Venice v. Van Nuys game.

Coach Dave Goosen had been needling us, calling us, and cajoling us into coming to this tournament so that we could see his team play, telling us we wouldn't be disappointed. And we weren't.

First, Glen McGowan: Glen is 6'-6", strong, athletic and looks like he's still going to grow. I sat in the stands watching him with Howie Levine, Gilbert Arenas' coach at Grant High, and with Dave Enowitz, the varsity coach at Reseda High. All of us were very impressed with this young man. He can drive inside, shoot from the perimeter, has a very quick first step to the basket, can get up and dunk (I saw at least 3 slams which were very impressive) and he has that same sort of look that Gil has: A seemingly very easy manner, light on his feet, almost as if he's playing slower than the rest of those around him, but then at times he just explodes to the hole. While he doesn't yet have the polish or sheer finesse of Arenas, he is surely a player who can take his game to the next level. In the game against Van Nuys, Glen scored a season high 36 points, had a bunch of assists, at least 4 steals that I saw, and two or three blocked shots.

Kevin Johnson (6'-3" Jr. F): Another very fine player, who had 10 points in the game against Van Nuys on Tuesday night. He actually looks a bit bigger than 6'-3" and standing next to McGowan, it's hard to discern much real difference in size. He played a great game, had eight rebounds and five blocks as well.

Kevin McQueen (6'-0" Sr. G) was another player from Venice who also impressed us. He looks sort of like Victor Munoz from Harvard-Westlake, although he's not quite as fast or as quick with his passing as is Victor. In the semifinal game we saw, Kevin had five three-pointers (for the second night in a row), and had a total of 17 points. Another very fine player, who would probably do very well at a smaller D-1 or a D-2 school.

Venice has some other really nice "supporting" role players, including Eric Matsubayashi, a fine little point who played well. He's quick, aggressive and has a fine touch.

About the game itself between Van Nuys and Venice, there really wasn't much to say except what's been said already. It was pretty much a blowout, and Venice was just killing them, by more than 30 points when Goosen went to his bench, taking out all the starters just into the fourth quarter. Even so, the final score ended up at 83-50, and it could have been 183 to 50 if he'd left in the starters. Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Coach Kevin Kannemura at Van Nuys has one of the longest benches we've seen, and he just continued to platoon his players in and out of the game, seemingly in whole bunches of fives. Maybe he's looking for the right combination; maybe he's just trying to even out the playing time. Whatever the intent, it's just not happening yet for the Wolves, and Van Nuys as of this game only had a record of 1-10. They've got some good high school athletes, but truthfully, we did not see any players who looked like they were going to be playing beyond their high school days. And what happened to Josh Brody? We didn't see him at all on the Van Nuys bench.

In other games played Tuesday night in the Van Nuys Tournament:

Kennedy 54, University 56

University managed to capitalize on a 21 point second quarter to win over Kennedy, securing the championship game against Venice on Wednesday. Montell Duhon and Nana Gbewonyo were the high scorers for Kennedy, which fell to 6-6 with the loss, hile Raoul Quivaros led University with 14 points.

Reseda 68, Hollywood 46

Jaimie Sibrian of Reseda was the high scorer with 23 points, while Larry Knox added 17, to improve Reseda's record to 5-8. For Hollywood, which is only 1-11 on the year, Vahe Melikyan had 22 points.

El Camino Real 70, SOCES 45

Justin Saad-Anthony was the high scorer for ECR with 23 points, which improved ECR's record to 4-6. Lawrence Lowe scored 22 points for SOCES in the loss, dropping them to 1-11 on the season.

In the next installment, we'll cover the finals of this tournament.