While most of Chapel Hill slept and the varsity team prepared for a matchup against Boston College, the North Carolina junior varsity men’s basketball team was up early Saturday morning, taking advantage of an explosive 29-6 second quarter en route to a 82-28 victory against Trinity School of Durham/Chapel Hill.
“Obviously they were a little bit overmatched, we had bigger players, more experience, but I think the team played really well today,” said sophomore Spenser Dalton.
Up just 21-9 after a mediocre first quarter performance, JV coach Hubert Davis emphatically told his team, “You’re just not playing hard enough.”
The Tar Heels heeded his word and responded by exploding with 13 unanswered points to start off the second quarter and never looked back, en route to a convincing victory to put the squad back at .500 at 3-3 .
“He just wanted us to not come out and play to the score, he wanted us to keep the same effort and same intensity,” said junior Jay Lamothe, who led the team offensively with five field goals . “Those few loose balls we didn’t get he wanted us to dive and go after them a little bit harder, so we just tried to do that and we picked it up in the second quarter once we got warmed up a little bit and took care of it from there.”
Dalton and Lamothe also led the team on the boards with four rebounds apiece , combining for over a third of the team’s total rebounds for the game .
“We had good ball movement, we had real good defensive rotations and we did a good job talking on ‘D,’” Dalton said.
With every player on the roster getting on the scoreboard in the lopsided game, UNC was able to spread the ball around and saw only two players get more than 15 minutes of playing time .
“I thought we came out and we didn’t want to underestimate them, we just wanted to come out and play hard, keep the same intensity that we do with any other team,” Lamothe said.
