Boys basketball plays in Cupertino tournament

The varsity boys basketball team participated in a tournament at Cupertino from Thursday, December 3 to Saturday, December 5. The team won against Independence High and Cupertino High, but lost to Bellarmine College Preparatory.

The team won its first game on Thursday at 4:00 p.m. against Independence High with a lead of around 20 points, according to team member junior Scott Yuan.

The following day the team lost by seven points against Bellarmine with a score of 53—60.

“It was pretty close the whole game,” Scott said.

On Saturday, the team won its final game against home team Cupertino High with a 27-point lead. The final score was 55—28.

Eight high schools participated in the tournament including Mills High, Homestead High, Leigh High, Independence High, Cupertino High, Bellarmine, Mountain View High and LAHS.

Because the tournament was pre-season, the results will not be counted toward leagues but will play a part in determining CCS standings.

To qualify for CCS the team must win at least half of its total pre-season games or finish in the top three teams in league.

According to Scott, the team had been looking forward to beating Bellarmine, which is in the Division I West Catholic League, a division higher than the Division II De Anza League that LAHS is in.

“Initially, they’re supposed to be a better team than us, but for that game they were missing two or three of their best players because they’re still in football CCS,” Scott said. “We obviously thought that we had a big chance of winning.”

The halftime score for the game was 20 to 29 with Bellarmine in the lead, and in the third quarter Los Altos had caught up to within three points. Scott said the team “kind of lost it” toward the end.

“We just had some periods where we played bad defense,” Scott said. “Our whole team’s actually pretty happy that we did do well against Bellarmine, and it’s a good marker for where are we at right now. But we’re also kind of disappointed because we were kind of hoping that [beating Bellarmine] would have boost[ed] our CCS rankings a lot because they’re a really good school.”

Scott said he thinks the biggest difference between this year’s team and last year’s is that the team is “a lot deeper this year,” meaning that while last year’s team played around 7 or 8 players, this year’s team plays up to 9 or 10 people.

“It doesn’t matter if one player does bad, because we have a lot of backups that are just as good almost,” Scott said.

The team will be participating in the Burlingame tournament from this Thursday, December 10 to Saturday, December 12, as well as in the Fremont tournament from Friday, December 18 to Tuesday, December 22.