By Kurt Howard

The Evergreen Wolverines took one on the chin from the Lindbergh Eagles in a West Central District III playoff game at Foss High School in Tacoma, Thursday night, February 16th. Final score was Evergreen 31, Lindbergh 55.

Evergreen had won the two previous conference games with Lindbergh but this is the playoffs. Could that cause an overconfident mindset before the game? “Always with teenagers.” Coach White said. “I harped on that, I harped on that all day yesterday at practice. I told them it doesn’t matter what happened in the regular reason, what happened earlier. Whether we beat them twice or they beat us twice, none of that matters. It’s what happens tomorrow night on the court. Maybe it was in their head and they came out a little overconfident, over looked them a little bit.”

To start the game Lindbergh scored on the opening tip-off, and as they say, they never looked back. Evergreen finally scored their first basket with 3:03 left in the first quarter. It wasn’t for lack of effort, they hustled but they just weren’t in sync.

In the second quarter it was more of the same. Evergreen scored their first point on a free throw with 3:10 left, and their first basket with only 2:00 left for a total of three points in the quarter.

Finally Evergreen outscored Lindbergh in the fourth quarter, 19-14, but it was too little too late. Sadly, Evergreen was never really in the game due to their poor shooting, passing, defense and rebounding. It was not a good time to play their worst game of the year.

A big reason, or should I say a tall reason why Evergreen may have had their problems is that 6’5” center Alex Campbell did not play in the game do to a medical reason. Alex usually contributes about 15 points and 10 rebounds per game along with his long defensive arms in the middle. His presence certainly wouldn’t have hurt.

After the game my opening question to Evergreen’s coach Tony White was, ‘are you in the mood to say anything?’ His response along with a chuckle was, “It’s just a game, it’s just a game.” What a great answer! In life, sports are only that, just a game. It’s not always easy to keep that in perspective but coach White does.

So how did they prepare for the game with Lindbergh? “We practiced hard and we prepared hard, we just didn’t execute the game plan.” Coach White said. “We knew what they were going to do, this is our third time playing them. We knew what they had. You have to give credit to them, they played harder than us, they wanted it more than us. For the first time all year they played passive, they weren’t aggressive. Instead of going out doing the hitting they would wait to be hit. We just kept getting hit and hit and hit all night long. We also shot the ball miserably.”

All is not lost for Evergreen because they have another chance when they play Port Angeles, Saturday at 4:30, again at Foss High School. It will be interesting to see what Evergreen team shows up, an aggressive or passive team. I’m pretty sure it will be the aggressive team I’ve seen earlier in the season.

When asked what Coach White thought about the saying; it’s better to lose by a lot than to lose a close game because you know what to work on when you lose by a lot, He laughed and said, “We would have done everything different.”