NAPA, Calif. - Last year the Justin-Siena boys basketball team upset Napa High. However, the tables turned on Friday night when Napa won by a score of 52-35.
“It feels really good because last year we did pretty bad, like we just played bad,” Napa sophomore post Brock Bowers said. “And then this year I feel like we came out and we kinda remembered that.”
The third quarter proved to be key in this game. Napa (9-5 overall, 1-0 Vine Valley Athletic League) held slim leads after a quarter and at the half, but their lead swelled to 21 points after the third quarter.
“I think we sped them up with our full-court D,” Bowers said of the third quarter. “And we were just getting boards.”
“They had a lot to do with us falling off,” Justin-Siena coach David Granucci explained. “You know they were physical, they played extremely hard. Our defense has been what we kinda hang our hat on. They were able to drive us pretty good. They were getting a lot of splits. We weren’t in the gaps like we normally are, and that’s a credit to them and they played extremely hard. They drove us hard, which is they didn’t finish they offensive rebounded the ball. So, they kinda took advantage of the fact that we didn’t play great defensively, which is tough for us because we have to play really good defensively to have success and we didn’t defend the way we normally defend. So, it has a lot to do with they played too, they played really well.”
“We just stuck to our gameplan,” Napa coach Zack Cook said. “We really talked about speeding the game up at halftime because they defend really, really well in the half court, so we wanted to get the game going up-and-down a little more and try to get some buckets in transition and speed them up as well and we were able to do that a little bit.”
The high scorer of the night was Bowers. He had 20 points and 15 rebounds; however, he had 14 points and six rebounds all in the first half.
“I was just putting back and stuff and grabbing lots of offensive boards,” Bowers said of his big night. “That was basically it.”
Zach Swim added 14 points and six rebounds for the Grizzlies.
The Braves (9-6, 0-2 VVAL) continued to have problems scoring on the night. Their leading scorer was Wyatt Humphries who had 10 points and six rebounds.
“I thought we got good looks,” Granucci said of the lack of scoring. “We struggle to make shots, I mean that’s no secret if you look at our stats and look at our scoring. It’s not like we’re blowing teams away (by) scoring 60 or 70 or anything like that.”
Napa will be back in action on Monday when they visit Sonoma Valley at 7 p.m. Justin-Siena will also face Sonoma Valley next, but their next game will be at 7 p.m. on Wednesday night in Sonoma.
