Bosco wins, moves on to Open final
BELLFLOWER ❯❯ Junior guard Jack Turner scored a gamehigh 20 points Friday to lead St. John Bosco's boys basketball team to a 6047 win at home against St. Bernard, and the Braves clinched a spot in the CIFSouthern Section Open Division championship game.
The Braves will face No. 1-seed Corona Centennial (28-3) in the final next Saturday, at the Honda Center in Anaheim.
“It's just a huge accomplishment,” Turner said. “It feels great. It's like all our hard work is almost paid off. We've got to the championship game. That's the goal we've had since we first met in the summer. Every single day of hard practice, every rep that we didn't want to do that we pushed through it's about to pay off and we have one more game so we're just excited to get to that.”
Bosco sophomore guard Elzie Harrington scored 12 points and hauled in a team-high seven rebounds. Senior center Xinyi Li added 10 points and five rebounds. Freshman guard Brandon McCoy Jr. added 11 points and five rebounds off the bench.
“What an amazing accomplishment by our guys,” said St. John Bosco coach Matt Dunn. “We've had a different guy every night, I think that's one of our great strengths.”
The No. 6-seeded Braves improved to 26-5 overall. After losing their first Open Division pool-play game at West Ranch on Feb. 10, they won their next two games in Pool B, defeating HarvardWestlake and St. Bernard.
Bosco won the three-way tiebreaker for the spot in the title game by defeating No. 2-seed Harvard-Westlake, which defeated No. 3-seed West Ranch on Friday night.
“It's hard to lose your first game. People already counting you out, but we stayed as a team,” Turner said. “We believe in our group 100% of the time, no matter what other people say, no matter about the seeding. We stuck to it and we're going to earn everyone's respect. That's what we're going to keep doing.”
Bosco jumped out to a 7-0 lead with 5:59 left in the first quarter. McCoy's first and-one of the night with 5.2 seconds left in the first quarter gave Bosco an 18-7 lead heading into the second quarter.
That 11-point margin in the first quarter ultimately prove to be insurmountable.
“The first quarter was the difference,” said St. Bernard coach Tony Bland. “We have a tendency to start slow. We have a really young team (five freshmen and three sophomores), but like I told them a couple of games ago against HarvardWestlake, we put ourselves in an 18-point hole in the Open Division and against really good teams. It's hard to climb out of that and St. John Bosco is a really good team and they proved it.”