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Men’s Basketball defeated by Upper Iowa, defeats Sioux Falls

The men’s basketball team played two game over the weekend against Upper Iowa on Friday, Nov. 8 and Sioux Falls on Saturday, Nov. 9. The Gorillas lost the game against Upper Iowa (62-73) but defeated Sioux Falls (62-55).  

Head coach Kim Anderson saw a lot of things the team did well and some things that they didn’t do so well.  

“I thought in the first game against Upper Iowa we played pretty well, for a first game, for about probably 25 minutes,” Anderson said. “…Then I think Upper Iowa made some shots on us and we panicked a little bit and probably quit doing what had made us successful, and that was sharing the basketball. If you try to make too many plays, we call them home run plays, where guys come down and try to make a play on their own… We were getting along pretty good sharing the basketball with each other and that’s kind of normal in a first game situation. The next game against Sioux Falls, we actually started off kind of rough, had trouble scoring. But I was really, really pleased with how we hung in there and how we got back in the game. We were down 13 and we got back to five at halftime and then we made a little run the second half and did a really good job defending Sioux Falls, which is kind of a bigger team that we are overall. So, all in all I was pretty pleased with the weekend. Certainly, you don’t (want to) lose a game, but I think coming back after losing on Friday and winning on Saturday showed that we learned something, and we did a great job of preparation on Saturday because we only had a very limited amount of time.”  

There were several players on the team that stood out to Anderson over the weekend.   

“In the game on Friday, Christian Edmondson played spectacularly,” Anderson said. “He had 19 points and 18 rebounds… That’s a really, really good game for anybody and he came through for us. Saturday was a lot better for everybody. I think if go back and if you look at our stats, Christian only had three points but he had 11 rebounds, Jah-Kobe Womack kind of broke out of his slump and had 14 points, Ray Elliott, who had struggled on Friday, came back with 17 points on Saturday, and Dejon Waters had 10 points. I thought R.J. Lawrence did a great job of running the point and kind of directing traffic. So, I thought Saturday’s game was obviously a lot better. We were a little bit more balanced than we were on Friday… I think those guys played well. We just have to become more consistent.”  

Anderson hopes to see the improvement and continue to improve in every game.  

“… So, we don’t play until our home opener on November 23. So, we have a lot of time to get better and we’ll probably put in some new offenses and work on our defense and just hopefully we’ll play better, and we just continue to improve as guys get healthy. We’ve had some nagging injuries, so we’ve got a little chance to heal up. Really, at this time of the year, you just (have to) hope to get better every game.”

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