The Jefferson Dragons basketball team knew going into Saturday’s first round of tournament play to open the season that the game would be rough.
That’s because they were up against Heritage, a team that was seventh in pre-season polls in the state in AAAA. Add to that the fact that many of the team’s larger players had played the night before in Jefferson’s second round football playoff game and hadn’t touched a basketball since June, and it certainly would have looked like an uphill fight from the beginning.
So it came as no huge surprise when the Dragons lost Saturday night 75-30 to Heritage.
They were scheduled to return to the court Tuesday night against Oconee in the second round of tournament play. Results were unavailable at press time. Tournament play is scheduled to continue on Saturday.
Jefferson coach Bolling DuBose said his team had two big things going against them Saturday night.
“First, they have a six-foot, eight kid in the middle named Justin Jones, who is real good, and we didn’t have an answer for him.”
DuBose said all of the Dragons’ bigger kids play football, and he didn’t start any of them Saturday night. Those that he did play went in during the second period in three minutes spurts.
“The second thing is that they won 20 games last year in AAAA and had everybody back but two kids,” DuBose said. “It was just one of those games where we were short-handed, and they would have been better than we were even if we had everybody and had been practicing for a couple of weeks.”
Chris Beck, who was moved to point guard for the game, had led the Dragons in scoring with seven points, and also led in rebounds with six. Darius Minor, who had played quarterback for Jefferson’s football team the night before, came off the bench and scored six in the second half to be the second leading scorer on the night.
The Dragons found themselves down 19-10 at the end of the first, and in the second period, the Dragons failed to score.
“In the third and fourth quarter, we did not play defensively at all,” DuBose said.
DuBose said the defense was the one thing he was disappointed in Saturday night.
“Offensively, I knew we were going to struggle, because they were bigger and they were quicker, and we were missing a lot of our best offensive players,” he said. “But defensively, I just felt like we gave up too many lay-ups, we let them get to the basket too easily, and we did not put pressure on their perimeter shooters. They shot the ball extremely well. They had 11 three-pointers. We just gave up a lot of wide open shots.”
But to be fair, DuBose said, there were a lot of younger players that took to the court against Heritage Saturday night.
“We played a kid at point guard, Andre Daniel, who was on the eighth grade team last year, and he’ll be playing a lot on varsity this year. This was his first varsity game as a ninth grader. We played some other younger kids who had been on the JV last year.”
DuBose said it’s not the way they wanted to start the season, but they knew going in that being short-handed, they would have to play a perfect game while Heritage had a bad game for it to be close.
“I thought (Heritage) played extremely well, and they shot the ball really well. Hopefully it will teach our kids what we have to do to be better and what kind of team we want to be.”
