December 12-16

Learned on Monday morning that the postponed game in Coatesville was rescheduled for February 4, it will be a Saturday afternoon as originally planned. The early part of the week was quiet except for Wednesday lunch with Jenny. On Thursday after supper I went over to basketball practice to get the scorebooks from Coach Powell so I could get them prepared for the (new) season opener on Friday. The program has twenty-three players on the roster, twelve on the varsity and thirteen on the JV squad (two players are going both ways). The varsity features five returnees, four who played JV in '15-16 and three others who are new to the organization. On Friday we boarded the bus for the ride north on route 72, the destination was Cedar Crest HS in Cornwall. It was unusual for the first game of the season to be a league game but it was of course not scheduled that way. In recent years CC has been one of the league's top programs and we have certainly had our moments with them both good and bad. Every season we seem to lose at least one game within the league that simply should not happen, maybe on this night we got this year's dog out of the way early. We lost 72-66 in overtime, after the game the coaches chalked it up to bad shots and poor decisions. The effort was there but the end results were not. Nine players got into the scoring column for JPM: Ricky Cruz led with 17, Greg Nunez had 10, Isiah Speller (younger brother of Randolph) and William Joseph had nine apiece, Jathan Gonzalez added eight, Gary Smith (from the '16 JV team) had six, newcomer Tallian Lehr added three and Juanya Gonzalez and R.J. Godwin (another member of the '16 JV) had two points each. The boys get back on the horse on Saturday with a non-league game in Chester (another place that is never easy to play in), the first game at home is on Monday the 19th. Take care, thanks for reading.