Last weekend Yorkdale Central School Hosted the East Central District Athletic Association Junior High School Boys Basketball Championship.
The games were played at the YRHS.
This championship has the eight-best teams in the Good Spirit School Division.
Perry Ostapowich, coach of the YRHS team, said they went into it seeded first. The opening game saw everyone in orange get their name on the scoresheet. They beat Langenburg 80-22.
"This was a good game for us as all players hit the scoresheet and the boys worked the offence well."
Their second game was against Preeceville.
"In this game, our forwards were able to control the boards resulting in a number of rebound points.
Forward Peter Kozushka scored 12, Jon Muir had 9 points while Alex Poppof 15 points and Ryan Krochak six points did a good job at the point guards positions."
Other scorers were: Jesse McDowell (2), Tanner Mak (5), Calin Bugera (2) Darius Haberstock (2) and Matthew McKee (2).
YRHS won 53-19.
Things got a little challenging for the YRHS in their third game of the tournament.
"Canora was by far the biggest team we played all year. In the first half, their low post players out-muscled us on rebounds making for a pretty physical game.
YRHS forward Muir fouled out early resulting in a need to shuffle our personelle moving point guard Popoff to a post position."
Ostapowich said this game was very very close.
"(The) score after the first half was very close with YRHS leading by seven points (31 - 24)."
It was time for coach Ostapowich to make some changes.
"For the second half we changed our offence a bit driving the key, resulting in a number of Canora fouls and ball movement by Krochak and Mak.
That resulted in our forwards getting some quality scoring opportunities."
Ostapowich added that Canora had trouble dealing with those changes.
"Canora had trouble with our full court press in the second half and we scored 12 points on turn overs alone."
Defensively the boys really picked it up limiting Canora to only eight points in the second half. I think this tight defence and forced turnovers really made a big difference in the game.
Darius Haberstock played his best defence of the year.
Teammates Bugera and Popoff both did a good job controlling the defensive rebounds.
This year's Gr. 9 team was a good group of athletes who played hard defence, were creative on the offensive side of the ball and were eager to learn.
For more tournament photos see our Photo Gallery.
