LONGBRIDGE, Birmingham — Callan Low scored a season-high 25 points and grabbed 12 rebounds to help unbeaten Myerscough defeat James Watt College 77-62 in the Elite Academy Basketball League on Wednesday.
Edoardo Del Cadia added 15 points and Konrad Kantorski had 14 for Myerscough, which started league play 3-0 for a fourth consecutive season. Mate Okros finished with a double-double of 10 points and 10 rebounds.
Defensive specialist Rayon Brown made his return to the team having been sidelined with a knee injury and gave Myerscough an immediate boost with four steals. His first of the game — a strip out of the full court press — pushed the the visitors into an early lead.
Despite shooting 37 percent, Myerscough scored at the appropriate times, including three-straight 3-pointers by Kantorski in the third quarter. The guard’s second of the period halted a 5-0 run, which had brought James Watt within 43-38.
Tyrell Brown and Victor Papa then combined to score five unanswered points for Myerscough to start the fourth quarter stifling any comeback.
Daniel Penkov had a game-high 29 points and hit five of 12 3-point attempts for James Watt College (2-2), and George Iliev was held to 11.
Head coach Neal Hopkins Quotes:
“It was a good defensive performance but there’s a lot of stuff we need to work on in there. The biggest thing we lack at the moment is a consistnt tempo at both ends of the floor — we go fast at the wrong times and go slow at the wrong times, so it is just getting to know each other a little bit better in these competitive games. We’ve got to work our limitations out — we saw some today and we can adjust on them but once we get a hang of our tempo, we will rectify some of the errors we’re making.
“Credit to Callan [Low] because he’s gone through a couple of weeks where his confidence was wavering a bit, but he’s got the resilience to battle through that and we saw that today at both ends of the floor. He’s tough and gets on with it and he was rewarded for it.
“He’s got a high-level of intensity and that’s key for us. He leads from the front and tbat’s what we need in this team. He sets the example early and you can see the rest of the guy feeding off that so hopefully as they get more used to playing with him they’ll start picking up some of his menaltiy and traits.”
Myerscough Player Quotes:
Callan Low
On scoring 24 points:
“It felt great to be able to use the Under-18 games to help myself to improve and obviously the EABL performances the past couple of games haven’t been too great. But especially getting some big numbers tonight, my confidence is even higher.”
On Myerscough’s defensive effort:
“There were big spells where we would hold them to very little points and there was a lot less individual basketball at the defensive end. I felt our team performance as a whole, we started to really pull together.
“Even though we held them to 62 points there were still spells where the defence was not as good as we hoped it would be. Hopefully in the coming games we can really start to make it even more difficult for teams.”
On the number of threats on Myerscough:
“The great thing about this team is we have so many players that can do things offensively and defensively, so if one player isn’t playing well, we can rely on each other to step up and that’s why we’ll win games.”
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