As the adage goes, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.
And the Sobrato boys basketball team overcame early miscues and missed opportunities to put away James Lick 55-38 Tuesday night.
The Bulldogs outscored the Comets 27-13 in the second half to pull out their third win of the season.
“The effort was there, the problem was early on we weren’t valuing our possessions,” said coach Lee Washington. “So we’d have a lot of steals to resteals or getting stops and basically throwing the ball away. We turned the ball over too much so we told ourselves that we’re good enough, if we get a shot up we’d get the offensive rebounds or, the way the refs were calling it, we’d get two shots.”
Washington said once the turnovers went down and the defense stepped up, things went a lot smother.
All of this was without big man Karl Mann, who is out with an injury suffered at the Leigh game.
Still, the Bulldogs had a huge night out of Bryce Shore, who put up a game-leading 22 points and 13 rebounds, with four steals and a block.
“You always want to have a good inside-outside threat so they (Shore and Mann) can playoff each other and complement each other and definitely he (Shore) has a lot of confidence being a third year player now on varsity,” Washington said.
To see Shore’s value, the team need look no further than the first half. There he put up 17 points, including nine from the free throw line, and he could have had more — he missed five free throw attempts.
At the end of the first quarter, Shore put the Bulldogs up by four thanks to getting fouled on a desperation 3-point attempt at the buzzer.
That put the Dogs up 14-10 and his second quarter effort helped lead to a 28-25 lead at the half.
Around him were solid nights from the entire team.
Nine players had at least one rebound, seven of whom had three or more.
“We made a personal challenge to everyone on the team, with Karl being out, at least everyone on the team needed to get six,” Washington said. “Some guys aren’t accustomed to getting that many, but we’re expecting 10 or 12 from some others, but for everyone to get six, everyone needs to be in there rebounding.”
Max Mosgrove was second on the team with eight, followed by Tim Givens, Kristian Maldia, and Juan Lozano who each had four.
Maldia also had a big second half, scoring 11 of his 17 points after half time.
He helped lead a third quarter charge that saw the Bulldogs just miss 20 points in the period, accounting for seven of the team’s 17 points.
Sobrato will now take the next week off before returning to the court to host the Bulldog Chase, tipping off Dec. 26.
