The Palo Alto High basketball team maintained its glossy record after defeating Milpitas 58-36 on Friday, Feb. 15.
The victory wrapped up for the Vikings a perfect (12-0) league season and improved their overall record to 23-1 heading into Friday's Open Division showdown with Archbishop Riordan.
Milpitas scored first on a three-pointer by Christian Rita, but Palo Alto quickly shot ahead and led 15-9 after the first quarter.
The Vikings stretched that lead to 38-15 at halftime behind the three-point accuracy of Aubrey Dawkins and Scotty Peery.
Palo Alto coach Adam Sax came into the game intent on shutting down Christian and Marcus Rita, Milpitas' excellent guard tandem.
Said Sax: “I knew they had two really good guards, the Rita brothers. Last time we had trouble guarding them. This time we were really going to concentrate on them."
After halftime, Milpitas gained some momemtum with Jason Scrempos finding the bottom of the net, but Palo Alto consistently shot well and Peery's three-pointer made it 50-26.
Said Sax: “Aubrey was shooting the ball very well from the outside, was hitting his threes. Peery was hitting his threes -- kinda opened up the driving lane for our guys, so I thought that was a key component as well,”
Despite his team's loss, Wrencher was not crestfallen.
“There weren’t a lot of mistakes," Wrencher said. "There was just a lid on the bucket and we didn’t shoot the ball well. But we got good shots, we got the shots we wanted. And believe it or not we played decent defense. So I am actually pretty satisfied with what I saw. I just wish we shot better than 30 percent."
Asked about his many timeouts, Wrencher said: “Sometimes you just want to stop the momentum from the other team. Maybe call a special play to get a good shot if they are struggling. In a game like this, I am going to use a lot of timeouts to keep them within our sights, but it didn’t help much.”
