After closing out last weekend’s Talon Tip-Off tournament with losses to Johnson and Pace Academy, the East Jackson Eagles boys’ basketball team is looking for improvement this week as it starts regular season play, and continues to prepare for region play.
The Eagles will host Oconee County Friday. In their one previous meeting, which occurred in a Christmas tournament last year, the Warriors defeated East Jackson 64-55.
As of Tuesday, both teams were winless on the season. Tip-off is scheduled for 8:30 p.m.
After an opening loss to Grayson, the Eagles looked to turn their fortunes around last Tuesday in the Talon Tip-Off when they went up against Johnson. Unfortunately, the turn didn’t happen, as the Knights won 59-48.
Kolby Gilbert scored 23 points to lead the Eagles.
After the Thanksgiving break, the tournament continued on Saturday, with the Eagles’ final pairing coming in a tight game against Pace Academy.
While the game went back and forth, with the lead swapping between four and six points throughout, Pace Academy was able to make some clutch shots late that East Jackson could not match, and came away with a 55-53 win.
“We had several chances to tie the game and go ahead,” said head coach Brian Turner. “We just didn’t play very smart at the time with some things, but our effort was better against Pace than in other games in the tournament. We changed our lineup around a little for this game.”
Brandon Garrett led the Eagles Pace with 12, while Standrick Stephens scored 11 points on the night.
The Eagles were scheduled to face Stephens County Tuesday night on the road. Results of that game were unavailable at press time.
Turner said when Friday comes around, he expects to see a similar playing style out of the Warriors, who are coached this year by Michael Youngblood.
“He and the coach he came up under are good friends of mine, so I’m expecting to see a lot of the stuff we do. They’re going to shoot the ball extremely well.”
Turner said the biggest thing he’s looking for over the next few games is improvement. He said he doesn’t feel his team is that far away.
“The biggest thing I’m looking for is improving execution,” he said. “We’re not a very good team right now as far as execution goes. We’ve got to get better at execution when we’re having to run an offense, and when it comes to set situations. We need to be able to execute and not turn the ball over or take a bad shot.”
Turner said the upcoming games should give the Eagles a good opportunity to work on those issues.
“That’s one reason that we made the schedule that we did this year. We wanted to make sure when we got to region, that we saw everything that we could possibly see before we got to region action.”
