DELAWARE – Mount Vernon boys basketball coach Nick Coon and Olentangy Berlin coach Donovan Barrett both agreed the difference in their teams' Wednesday, Dec. 9, non-league contest was effort.
The host Bears opened the second half with an 18-0 run and cruised to a decisive 56-36 win over the Yellow Jackets in Delaware.
"Overall, I think we need to play with energy and not wait for something good to happen to play with good energy," Coon said. "It can't be that way — it's gotta be the other way around. Good things happen when you get five guys and our bench playing with energy, communicating and having a togetherness about us. Until that point — on a consistent basis — we're gonna struggle because we're not gonna overpower people talent-wise."
Barrett described his team in a similar fashion.
"We've got some renewed energy," he said. "We talk about energy and effort all the time. We don't want to remind them about, but we want to talk about how it effects the game. We don't have spectacular athletes, and we got a lot of deficiencies at different parts. But our effort can cover up a lot of that."
The win puts the Bears (3-0) one win away from tying the program record for wins in a season.
"The third quarter, our approach was really good," Barrett said. "Our kids came out (and) played super-hard — were active on defense — which then led us to, probably, the best offensive quarter we've had in (our) three years."
"Shocked" was the telling word in Coon's postgame comments. He had bigger expectations for this season than an 0-3 start.
"I'm pretty shocked in the result of the game, because I really thought that we had two good days of practice and we had an understanding of things we needed to clean up," he said. "The same things haunted us today as did this past weekend."
Berlin scored 16 of its 22 made field goals in the paint, had six offensive rebounds, and 13 steals of MV's 18 turnovers.
"We gave up too many straight-line drives to the basket for layups," Coon said. "We gave up too many loose balls or offensive rebounds. We had too many turnovers on our offensive side of the ball. Those three areas really hurt us last weekend and we didn't get those cleaned up."
The Bears (3-0) opened the game 7-0 and led by as many as 16 points before the Yellow Jackets closed the half with an 8-0 run highlighted by a pair of Owynn Gleason 3-pointers to pull within 30-22 at the break.
But it was an 18-0 start to the third quarter that really did in Mount Vernon, which scored the last seven points of the third quarter to close the gap to 19 before an evenly-scored fourth quarter.
Derek Goodman paced the Bears with 16 points, three assists and three steals; Jason Inbody had 14 points, seven rebounds, four steals and a pair of assists; and Austin Corley chipped in 11 points, two rebounds, two assists and two steals.
Blake Meyer scored seven of the Jackets' first nine points and finished with nine points and five rebounds.
Gleason backed Meyer with eight points, three rebounds and two steals; Beau Bridges added seven points, two rebounds, two assists and two blocks; and Caden Rowland had nine rebounds to go with four points for MV.
