The Beatty Hornets men’s basketball team completely destroyed Lund at home last Friday 87-11. The win came easily for the Hornets, so much so Hornets Coach Joe Serrano said, “I knew we had the game in the bag after the first two minutes of the game,” he said. “We had a 14 point lead to 0 in the first minutes of the game.”
For Serrano, who starts league this week against World of Life on Friday and Tonopah on Saturday, he says this game was more of a momentum builder for his team. So far Beatty has been hanging in there with some tough losses in the preseason. The team is 2-5 overall with its other win against Trona. The team has played a lot of Division III teams like Meadows and Lake Mead to sharpen their skills.
“I played my starters a little bit more because we have to get ready for league. I put in a new zone offense after Christmas and we only had four days to work on it. I figured I would try to work on it during the last game. It seemed like we got more shots inside the paint. We will see how it goes this week. It looks like the kids learned it well in four days. We have a game against Beaver Dam before League on Tuesday. We had 24 assists against Lund compared to our last game against Mountain View where we only had three,” he said.
Serrano said his team was learning a new offense. Obviously against Lund, the team got it down. “Our team is starting to believe in the system more. We could have scored at will against those guys. Hopefully when league comes around we can still shoot. This was more of a scrimmage for us,” the coach said.
The team shot the ball pretty well and shot 57 percent as a team. The Hornets only had 12 turnovers and that was still too much for Serrano.
“It was like playing a junior varsity team. They were a little smaller than us. We played a lot faster and we got a lot of lay-ups. I had my team slow it down pretty much the second, third and fourth quarter. I told them we could only score if we get a wide open shot from our offense, or if it was an easy lay up,” Serrano said.
The two leading scorers for the game were Angel Hernandez who had 21 points and Nick Zamora who had 18 points.
He said he changed his offense and altered his defense from a man defense to a 3-2-trap offense. He feels this will fit his team better.
“We have some speed and no height and it is kind of hard to play a good man defense,” he said.
Beatty saw Word of Life at an earlier tournament and only lost to them by seven points. Word of Life is just coming off a victory over Pahranagat Valley 42-32. This Friday’s Word of Life game should be a good test for the young Beatty team.
Junior forward Wyatt Henry was in disbelief that Pahranagat Valley lost to Word of Life.
“I really didn’t think that Alamo played their first string or maybe Word of Life played their junior varsity team,” he said.
According to Nevada Preps, Word of Life played Pahranagat Valley varsity and it was a league game. Pahranagat is now 2-14 overall and 0-1 in league play.
The Pahranagat score surprised Serrano, but he just told his team to keep playing their game and not to worry about other teams.
“I want to pressure Word of Life and try to trap them and get them tired. I really did not think Word was that good. When we played them we got into foul trouble. I think our league is wide open for anyone to take,” the coach said.