Westmont Men’s Basketball made 29 of 34 free throws and defeated the Golden Eagles of La Sierra 81-70.
“I think we just didn’t play collectively well. We’re still finding ourselves,” said Westmont head coach John Moore. “Collectively, we just aren’t as good as we need to be at this point, that’s partially because we have so many new guys.”
Senior captains Jerry Karczewski and Sean Harman continue to play solid basketball for the Warriors. The two led Westmont’s scoring efforts, with 22 and 15 points, respectively.
Westmont was down for much of the first half before taking the lead with 5:41 left in the half. Through the rest of play, the Warriors never surrendered their lead, although they had trouble putting La Sierra away.
“We just didn’t have connective stops in the way that we need to, where if we have three stops we could increase the lead from eight to 15. I thought La Sierra did a really nice job of coming back and establishing themselves at points where I thought we were going to lose them. They kept fighting back.”
Westmont performed extremely well from the free throw line. They got to the line 34 times to La Sierra’s 14. They had three players in Harman, Karczewski, and David Gunn get to the line six or more times.
Moore said, “David Gunn just continues to make free throws late in the game – he was 6-6. He’s just such a fine shooter.
“I thought our younger guys were really good from the free throw line – especially Kyle Scalmanini who was 4-4,” recalled Moore. “I think he really established himself as a contender for more playing time, as did Ben Okhotin.
“Both those guys played the kind of basketball that we would want our older guys to play. They aren’t playing like freshman right now. It was important for them to play well tonight because we needed them,” applauded Moore.
Okhotin added 13 points for the Warriors and shot 50% from the floor. Scalmanini finished with six points.
Westmont returns back to Murchison Gymnasium this Saturday to host the University of Redlands. Tip-off is scheduled for 4:00 p.m.