Northwestern boys win over Gilbert

WINSTED — The Gilbert School boys varsity basketball team fell to Northwestern Regional High School during a home game on Friday, Jan. 16.Gilbert had already fallen behind with a score of 37-24 at halftime. They were not able to recover and ultimately lost the game, 74-38.Yellowjackets Coach Mark Douglass said the game showed a lot of the team’s deficiencies.“We need to learn to become a better offensive team and be more patient,” Douglass said. “We can’t get rattled and let situations bother us. We can’t get on each other when we fall behind or because passes are not going our way. We have to learn to go through them. You hate to see a loss, but it’s a learning experience. It’s a humbling one to get beat that badly when you’ve been playing so good. Over a 20-game season you’re going to have a couple bad games and I’m going to chalk this up to the rivalry coming in more fired up than us and ready to go, plain and simple. We just let too many things bother us.”Douglass said one of the problems with the team is that the players were not focused.“I’m going to take the blame, and we will work on preparation,” he said. “We’ll go back to the drawing board and reset our goals. It will take hard work from the coaching staff and the players. Regional is a pretty good team. Any team that can have three guards that can handle the ball will always put a little pressure on you and we’re trying to find our niche with that. We’re going to review tomorrow and see what we can do to get better.”Northwestern coach Doug Sebach expressed surprise at the final score.“I didn’t expect this because I thought it would be a close game,” Sebach said. “I expect the next game to be tight. We’ve played Gilbert before and usually we have close games. This is out of the ordinary. I’m not sure what happened. I can’t explain it. Maybe they had an off night. They’re a better team than the score shows, much better.”Sebach said that his team still has a lot of work to do.“We practice a lot and we have one more game and then we’re moving into the second half of the season,” he said. “If we’re getting better, that’s good, but I’m not totally satisfied with everything that we did tonight. We do have things to work on. So far we’re starting to work as a team, and that’s helped us the last four or five games. We’ve won eight and lost two this season but we have a long way to go. I’m proud, but we have a lot of games in the second half and a lot of good teams we’ll be playing against, so we have our work cut out for us. If we could end up winning this many the second half, that would be great. There are a lot of solid teams, though, and we could easily get knocked off. Our strategy is to take it one game at a time.”