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Show Page 6 AMERICAN FORK CITIZEN Thursday, March 13, 2008 C 0 M M UNfTY SPORTS, PEOPLE AND OUTDOOR FUN Another niqht on the hardcourt Lone Peak stars, AFs Meacham help North team to All-Star victory Russjyman NORTH COUNTY It doesn't take a rocket scientist, sci-entist, or even a great Zucchini, Zucchi-ni, to figure out what to do if you have Lone Peak's Bracken Funk, Josh Sharp and Justin Hamilton on your team. Just give them the dang ball. Which, unsurprisingly, is what Neil Warner's North All-Stars did enroute to their 120-100 win over the South All-Stars on Tuesday night at Timpview High School in the 12th annual Utah Valley All-"Star All-"Star Classic. Lone Peak's tall and talented talent-ed trio combined to score 60 points, led by the MVP Funk's 34, to lead the North team to the win. "We want to go where our money is and obviously when you outsize a team by six inches per player, you want to go inside," Funk said. "I think that's what we did and we got it done." When asked what he would -say to those who thought that the North had a stacked team, Funk simply answered, "Amen." American Fork's Greg Meacham also turned in a pretty decent night's work with eight points, including a pair of treys, along with eight assists on some spectacular passing, plus a pair of rebounds re-bounds and a steal. Although the North, which had Lone Peak's big men, the No. 2 scorer in the state Skyler Halford, and sharpshooters sharp-shooters Craig Tucker and Goose Kallunki among other talented players, were heavily ', favored going in, the South ', squad more than held its own ;, for much of the first half. Executing coach Jimmy De-.". De-.". Graffenreid's "If you're open, shoot it" strategy to perfec-; perfec-; tion, the South team came out firing, and hitting, to open up " a 10-point lead in the second ; quarter. However, the South team's ' live-and-die by the 3-pointer ! philosophy turned into them dying by the 3 when they went cold late in the first half. The North squad took advantage ad-vantage to tie the game at 48 before going on an 1 1-2 run to open up a 59-50 advantage at Z the half. ; What was a close game early on turned into a blowout blow-out in the third quarter. The North team continued the momentum it built at the end of the first half into the second sec-ond and came out firing on all cylinders. Paced by a 10-point effort from Funk, the North led by as much as 30 points during the decisive third quarter and never looked back. In the meantime, the South team continued its cold shooting from beyond the arc. "We talked at the half about extending our defense and I think that made a lot of difference," differ-ence," Warner said. Although improved defense made a big difference for the North, the defense, or lack thereof, played by both sides would still be enough to make Provo coach Craig Drury cringe. The two teams combined to score 220 points, and Funk's 34 broke the all-time Classic scoring record. In addition, the two teams combined to drain 30 treys, including in-cluding 19 by the South squad. When asked if his team was living and dying by the 3, De-Graff De-Graff enreid responded, "Oh we were, we had to, we were all 6'3" (or shorter)." Leading the way on 3-point-ers was South team MVP Michael Mi-chael Salazar, who scored 21 points on seven of them. Salazar showed just how dedicated his team was to the 3 in the second half when he jokingly argued with a ref to just let them inbound the ball instead of going to shoot a 1-and-l. "We'd rather just shoot a 3 than get a 1-and-l," Salazar said with a laugh. "That's one point, we want 's. We were just joking; it was fun." Aside from the size disadvantage, disad-vantage, Salazar pointed out that there may have been a different explanation for his team's loss. "This North team practiced last night," Salazar quipped. "I was surprised they didn't do a full-court press or something." Warner denied the allegation allega-tion of his practice helping his team win. "We practice every year and we usually lose," he said. With all the joking aside, as usual the Classic provided the valley's top seniors a chance to play with each other one I ' ... V i 1 V' ' V . - sC- - i 1 A '-7 7 MARIO RUIZNorth County American Fork's Greg Meacham drives the bull up the court during the Utah Valley All-Star Basketball Classic at Timpview High on Tuesday. last time in a no-pressure environment. en-vironment. "It was fun to go out here and have one more game," Funk said. "We're all actually pretty good friends, we always al-ways have been. It's just kind of cool to get out here and share the ball." Funk was the recipient of much of the sharing. Meacham connected with Funk not once, but twice on off-the-backboard alley -oops on fast breaks in the second half. In the first period, Meacham also served Funk a nifty reverse bounce pass in the paint, which the Knight obligingly netted. Kallunki also shared with his new teammate Hamilton on an alley-oop in the first quarter. Warner commented afterward that his team accomplished ac-complished a goal by out-dunking out-dunking the south squad. "I think it was the best group, the funnest group I've been able to work with," Warner said. "I really had a good time." Aside from Funk's 34, the North team got 16 points from Tucker. 13 apiece from Halford, Half-ord, Hamilton and Sharp, and 1 1 points from Kallunki. A girls game was held prior to this one but did not have any Caveman representatives because all of the starters this season were underclassmen. Amy Krommenhoek participated par-ticipated in the 3-point shooting shoot-ing contest, still wearing her softball uniform after coming com-ing directly from American Fol k's victory at Provo. t Beky Beaton confributed to this reports. 12 seniors expected to help AF to do well in Region 4 baseball Dean Von Memmott SPORTS CORRESPONDENT The American Fork baseball team opened the baseball season with a shutout win over the Copper Cop-per Hills Grizzlies on Thursday. Caveman coach Jarod Ingersoll said, "We have 20 kids on the varsity var-sity roster. Twelve of them are seniors. One of them is a move-in. He is Bo Fisher. He played for Hillcrest last year. We have five returning starters this year. They are Jake Murphy, Andy Lewis, Tanner Christensen, Gentry Haws and Randy Searle. "All of our seniors got a lot of varsity experience last year, so we expect to do well this spring." American Fork has two experienced experi-enced pitchers back: Josh Mooney and Stu Duersch. Both received a taste of varsity baseball when they played for the Cavemen's 17-under team during Utah Amateur Baseball Association action last summer. "I think our pitchers can compete com-pete with any team," said Ingersoll. Inger-soll. "They threw well in summer baseball last year." Among other Cavemen to watch out for this year are Jake Perry and Nate Pitcher. Many of the players on this year's baseball team played together togeth-er on the American Fork National League all-star team that won the Western Boys' Baseball Association's Associa-tion's 2002 Little World Series. Ingersoll said the team will travel down to St. George for the Red Rock Classic. The coach said, "We will be playing some really tough teams at it like nationally-ranked nationally-ranked Bishop Gorman of Las Vegas Ve-gas Nevada and Pleasant Grove. "Other schools we'll be playing in preseason include Cottonwood, Jordan Jor-dan and Fremont. All three of those schools finished in the top three at last year's state tournament. "Before region starts, we're going go-ing to finish our preseason with a trip to a weekend invitational in Henderson, Nevada, in early April," the coach added. Ingersoll predicted that this year's Region 4 competition will be really hard, especially with Lehi now in the league. The coach said, "Timpanogos and Spanish Fork will be the teams to beat in region play. Pleasant Grove, Lehi and Lone Peak also promise to give us strong competition. There won't be any easy team in our region." Ingersoll said his assistants this year include Ricky Lyman, Jay Holmstead, Eric Olsen, Jake Fisher and Glen Taylor. Caveman baseball team blanks Copper Hills, 12-0 y - Jordan Christiansen SPORTS CORRESPONDENT Think of a caveman and you'll like ly conjure up the image of a lumbering lumber-ing Neanderthal holding a big stick limply at his side. But when you think of an American Ameri-can Fork Caveman, keep the stick, just have a quick player using it to knock balls all over the field as his teammates round the bases. American Fork started the season with a bang, smacking 17 hits on the way to a ridiculously easy 12-0 win over Copper Hills in five innings Thursday afternoon. Six players had two or more hits for the Cavemen, who kept the bats aflame despite the windy, cold weather. Starting pitcher Josh Mooney enjoyed a stellar day, getting three hits (including two doubles), two RBI and a run while striking out four batters and allowing no runs on the mound. "Our pitcher did a pretty good job throwing strikes," American Fork coach Jarod Ingersoll said. "For a first game, we did some good things. We've got a long ways to go though." After bringing in two runs in the opening inning, American Fork went down the order to score five more in the second. Stuart Duersch, Tanner Christensen and Gentry Haws quickly loaded up the bases, then second basemen Andy Lewis kept the hitting streak alive by reaching base on a single, sending in two runs. Haws scored next on a passed ball and Jake Murphy hit another RBI single. rewind In a pure team effort, eight total Cavemen crossed the plate. Along with Mooney's power hitting, Christensen Chris-tensen went 3-for-3 with two runs and Nate Pitcher brought in three runs off two singles. "I think we can swing it," Ingersoll Inger-soll said. "We're a long ways from a finished product but we've got some guys who I think can put a charge in the ball." The third inning was a repeat of the second, as Duersch, Christensen and Haws again got things started by reaching base, with Haws loading the bags up on a perfect bunt down the left-field left-field line. Though Copper Hills switched pitchers during the inning, the Cavemen Cave-men kept on scoring, earning three more runs. Two more in the fourth inning ended the game mercifully two innings early. "These guys have worked real hard to get to this point but we've got to keep working," Ingersoll said. "These kids are a humble group. They know it's going to take a lot of hard work to be successful and get where we need to be." Softball I March 8 American Fork earns three wins in Dixie: The Cavemen brought home a 3-2 record from the St. George Invitational last weekend. "We lost our first two games on Friday," said American Fork coach Duke Sorenson. "The next day, we won all three of the games we played." In spite of the three-game winning win-ning streak, American Fork couldn't advance into medal play, but it did produce a second-place finish in pool play. In Friday's first round, Cimmaron High of Las Vegas defeated American Ameri-can Fork 9-0. Sorenson said, "We had eight hits in the game. We just couldn't convert on any of them. Every time we would have the bases loaded, they would strike our batters out or come up with a force play at second or third." The Sky View Bobcats defeated American Fork 9-2 in the other Friday Fri-day game. Sorenson said, "Amy Krommenhoek and Shelby Swapp scored the two runs for us. We posted five hits in the game, but we gave up seven hits to Sky View. We had a bunch of errors in our first two games at St. George. We had only two errors in our Saturday Satur-day games." In the first Saturday game, American Ameri-can Fork defeated the Skyline Eagles 104. Sorenson said, "Mallory Davis hit a two-run double for us. Everybody made a hit for us in this one. Amy Krommenhoek had two singles. Altogether, Alto-gether, we registered 10 hits for the game." American Fork next knocked off the Mountain Crest Mustangs 5-2. During that win, Davis hit a double while Haley Holmstead and Shelbi Peterson Pe-terson each contributed two singles. Krommenhoek, Sandra Nessler and Kayla Sorenson each added a single. "We posted 11 hits in our 12-4 win over Pine View," said Sorenson. "Shelby Swapp hit a double and a triple for us in that game. Sandra 77 CXTO ri V- t XI uulw CRAIG. DILGERNorth County American Fork's Gentry Haws (8) is congratulated by his teammates after scoring during the Cavemen's 12-0 victory over Copper Hills on March 6 Nessler and Mallory Davis each post- I March 1 1 - American Fork 8, Provo 5- ed a double for us. We used both Kay- At Provo, American Fork capitalized la Sorenson and Annie Christensen as on eight Provo errors to win in non-pitchers non-pitchers in that game. region action. "We finished the final day with 28 hits and 27 runs," the coach said. See REWIND Page 7 |