The Sinclair Community College men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball teams were rewarded for their good record in conference play with home first round playoff games.
\nOn March 1, the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) District XII tournament began, and the top four seeds of the conference got a home playoff game for the first round of the tournament.
\nSeeding in the tournament was determined by records in conference play, rather than overall records. Sinclair\u2019s men were ranked fourth in the conference with a 7-5 record (20-8 overall), and played Lakeland Community College, the fifth seed.
\nThis was the third time these two teams faced off, with Sinclair defeating them the other two times. The first match up Sinclair won in Lakeland 77-74 on Jan. 1, and also won 74-66 on Feb. 26.
\nCoach Jeff Price believed that his team was ready for the challenge against a familiar foe.
\n\u201cWe already beat them twice earlier in the season, and it\u2019s tough to defeat a team three times in year,\u201d Price said. \u201cBut our game plan worked twice so we stuck with it.\u201d
\nLakeland had a run at the end of the first half, never looked back, and won 85-63 to advance to the second round.
\nThe difference in the game was the shooting. Sinclair shot only 32 percent from the field against Lakeland\u2019s 52 percent.
\n\u201cThere was no way we could of stopped them inside, so we decided to play man and focus our defense on stopping their perimeter players,\u201d Price said. \u201cBut this game they just started making shots and everything went downhill from there.\u201d
\nLakeland\u2019s two top perimeter players, William Powell and Alex Sullivan, shot a total of 21 percent from the field and 19 percent on threes in the two losses. During the tournament win, they shot 45 percent from the field and 44 percent from threes.
\n\u201cWhen the other team misses shots, you get more transition opportunities,\u201d Price said. \u201cWe lost about 8-12 points on transition, and that helped get us out of our flow.\u201d
\nRegardless of the outcome. coach Price said he is very proud of his team and how they played this season.
\n\u201cWe had a lot of inexperience, every player on our team was a freshman except for one,\u201d Price said. \u201cSo there was a steep learning curve, and three months in the season we we\u2019re still learning sets. For us to win 20 games in a season shows how hard our players practice and played during the season.\u201d
\nSinclair player Darrien Wilkens was named first-team All-Conference and was voted third for conference MVP voting. The top two in MVP voting are up for All-American consideration. Patrick Crawford and Mark Allen were voted for All-Conference honorable mention.
\n\u201cWe have some very talented players, and throughout the season they grew so much,\u201d Price said. \u201cSome of our players will move on to Division-1 schools, which is the way we look at success here. We want to help our players move on to four year schools and finish out their education.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sinclair women in the postseason
\nThe Lady Tartans were also ranked fourth in the conference with a 6-6 record (16-8 overall), and played the fifth seeded Columbus State Community College Cougars.
\nSinclair and Columbus State played twice this season, with Sinclair winning both games. On Feb. 12 Sinclair won 78-72 in Columbus and 83-72 at home on March 1.
\nAt the end of the first half, Sinclair was ahead 40-29, and kept that lead throughout the game with a 83-72 win.
\nCoach Jeff Dillon said that their team was ready to play, and looks forward for the chance to move one.
\n\u201cWe are a transition team, and we started to hit shots,\u201d Dillon said. \u201cWe have the talent to play with anyone in the nation if we play our game and we\u2019re excited for the chance to continue on in the conference tournament.\u201d
\nAt press time, the Lady Tartans did not begin their conference tournament games yet. Check www.sinclairclarion.com Monday afternoon for a recap of their tournament game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Sinclair Community College men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball teams were rewarded for their good record in conference play with home first round playoff games. On March 1, the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) District XII tournament began, and the top four seeds of the conference got a home playoff game for the first round […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-1AJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6121"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6165,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6121\/revisions\/6165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}