After winning six consecutive league championships, the Colony boys basketball team seeks motivation anywhere it can find it. After a 67-61 defeat of Don Lugo Friday night, the Titans are running out of scores to settle.
Colony has lost two league games in the last seven seasons. Don Lugo’s two-point victory three weeks ago was the most recent. The other was a three-point loss to Montclair last season, which Colony avenged with a 31-point thrashing last week.
The Titans (15-6, 7-1) are now tied with Montclair atop the Mt. Baldy League standings with five games remaining in the regular season, the final of which is a Feb. 9 showdown at home against Montclair.
Don Lugo (15-6, 6-2) had yet to lose a league game on the court this season until Friday night, but the Conquistadores had to forfeit a two-point win over Montclair Jan. 9 after suspended players participated in the game. The suspensions were the result of a brawl in Don Lugo’s first meeting with Colony. Instead of being tied for the league lead after splitting the season series with the team it faced Friday night, Don Lugo looking up at two teams in the league standings.
“We knew we had to win this game,” Colony coach Jerry De Fabiis said, “if we were going to have a shot at our seventh league title.”
Colony’s Miles Poullard scored eight of his 26 points in the fourth quarter to hold off Don Lugo. The Conquistadores pulled within four with 1:49 left to play on a driving lay-up by point guard Mark Eden, who led Don Lugo with 19 points. But a clutch basket by sophomore post man Kennieth Barnes, who had 23 points and 12 rebounds, was sandwiched a pair of Colony defensive stops to give the Titans a 66-58 lead with 1:35 to play.
Don Lugo may have lost the game when it fell behind by eight courtesy of a Colony 10-0 run to end the third quarter. The Conquistadores started both the first and third quarters slow and eventually gave themselves one too many holes to climb out of.
“I was proud of us for coming back in the first half to tie the game,” Don Lugo coach William Thigpen said. “But they surged there at the end of the third quarter. Hats off to them. The won this one and took advantage of their home court.”
T.A. Dixon, who had 18 points for Don Lugo, led his team back from an 18-8 first-quarter deficit to tie the game at 32 going into halftime. But Colony opened the second half with an 8-2 run from which Don Lugo never fully recovered.
Poullard scored 14 of his points in a nine-minute stretch bridging the third and fourth quarters during which Colony outscored Don Lugo, 18-9 to take a 60-49 lead with 3:30 to play. The 6-foot-2 senior, a high jumper who advanced to last year’s state track meet, ended the run with a fast-breaking dunk.
“I haven’t seen anyone able to stay in front of (Poullard),” De Fabiis said. “He makes big baskets when we need him to.”
Now that Colony has exacted its revenge on both Don Lugo and Montclair, the Titans need to look no further for motivation than a potential seventh straight Mt. Baldy League championship.
