Limon 64 Sanatura Escazu 76

I can't express how much I dislike the change in schedule. In prior years, the season ran roughly from March til October. This year the Federation decided to move up the calendar. The first reason is to coincide with the FIBA international calendar. The second, and main reason, was that so the national team would be in fighting form for the Central American Games this coming March. On paper, both reasons make sense, but there was a huge problem in execution. To make that happen, they moved up this year's start four months which means we got a very short break between the last season and the current season.

The other big consequence is that we know have basketball games in December and January. Costa Rica shuts down from December 25th til mid January. Throughout December there are a bunch of office parties, family gatherings and Christmas shopping. Then most people take breaks to go to the beach or spend time with their families. Our league is not used to playing or practicing this time period, this being the first year it was hard to schedule practices and keep the team activ for the league's twoo week brea (in our case it as a little longer since we had our bye date coincide with the last weekend).
So after two weeks of uneven practce (and suspending for about ten days), we went into a game against Limon still shaking off our collective cobwebs. The first surprise of the game was that Limon was missing its post players: Hernol Gardener, Libert Cohen and Marlon Samuels. So our preparation for a post dominated team went out the window as we adjusted to lineups that basically didnt have a true post.

We jumped out to a big lead based on our fast break attack. Everyone got in on the scoring as we built a 16 point lead. Late in the second quarter, Harold Mitchell got hot for Limon, knocking down three 3 pointers and reducing our lead to a mere 4 points. We just didn't do a very good job of recognizing the hot hand in a four minute stretch where Mitchell caught fire.

In the second half we went back to our running game and made some defensive adjustments, expanding the lead to double digits. We then rotated our bench and gave everyone a chance to knock the cobwebs off their game, leading to an uneventful victory.

Game Notes

• David Carnegie had a strong second half, scoring 13 points and adding 11 rebounds to lead us in scoring and rebounds. We had several guys score more than ten points, as we did a pretty good job of spreading the wealth.
• Harold Mitchell ended up with 29 points for Limon. 
• One of the younger refs was at the game and it showed. Dave Millinier got mugged on repeated occasion without drawing the foul calls. A total of 27 fouls were called in the entire game, which is about 15 fouls less tahn the league average.
• Our three point was uncharacteristically bad in this game with Diego Loria hitting the only three pointer. We have been a pretty good shooting team but we were ice cold.