Pilgrims recap - Q&A with Plymouth’s Grindle
Q — Penn was everything they were advertised and you guys really played very well, but I’m sure in the back of your head is just how many times we can be satisfied with playing well without a win?
a — Penn has every ingredient that you could ever want from a team. They have an all-american level guard, Mr. Basketball candidate, just unbelievable talent-wise, in (Marcus) Burton.
Honestly, we did a pretty good job on him for the most part holding him to 17-18 in the first half really was good. When you are playing a kid who is now the leading scorer in St. Joe county history and put that in perspective by remembering all the great players they’ve had in all the South Bend schools and the Marian’s and St. Joe’s.
Trey Hall did as respectable a job as anybody has done on him and Coby Walters got to play him a lot when Trey got in foul trouble and they both did as good a job as anybody has done on him.
The trouble is they have so many other good players.
all in all outside of the first quarter — we were shell-shocked a little bit out of the gate — and I think sometimes you get in your head ‘how good are these guys really and can we compete?’
I think our guys questioned their ability if they could. I thought we could. I knew we could, but I knew we’d have to play really, really well.
We got jumped on and they’ve done that to almost everybody all year. Our kids settled down and the middle two quarters we played them even.
You take that first quarter out of there it’s a three-point game. It really makes you wish you could get the script flipped to play well for the first three quarters and see what happens in the fourth.
Q — Usually in the pre-sectional week you only have one game but you have the game Tuesday at St. Joe and then on the road for a makeup game at New Prairie on Thursday. How do you feel about that?
a — They had all their success in football and we tried multiple times to get that makeup game several times and this was not our first choice of date but it was all we could do.
The tournament draw (the Pilgrims drew Mishawaka for the 8 p.m. game on Tuesday at Laporte) will help us decide how the week is going to go.
We will start out with St. Joe and they’ve been up and down. They’ve lost to some really good teams.
New Prairie has been playing better lately. They are coming on strong. They played Michigan City in a pretty tough game but they beat South Bend Adams.
New Prairie is a long drive on Thursday night after playing Tuesday and having one day to prepare.
The two teams (St. Joe and New Prairie) do a lot of similar things. They both like some zone action and we’ve had all week to prepare for some things.
Quite honestly we are at the point in the season where there isn’t much that we haven’t seen. There aren’t too many defenses or offenses that we haven’t seen and gone over in scouting reports time and time again.
You always have to talk about the different personnel on each team but at this point where we are at, we like what we have in. We like the things we are doing. We like the style of play here lately, we like our intensity.
We’ve focused on us this week and we will get some St. Joe specific stuff and then some New Prairie specific stuff but basically, it’s knowing their players and what they like to do, but there aren’t a lot of surprises at this point. It’s a matter of going out and executing.