Junior forward Jeffrey Parker had 20 points and led the Western men’s basketball team to a 92-53 victory over Flagler College on Friday night, Nov. 20, at home.
The Vikings came off a 93-80 loss against Brigham Young University-Hawaii going into the game.
“[We want to focus] on the little things, like being in the right spots and knowing where we are supposed to be on offense,” senior guard Kyle Impero said.
Against Flagler, Western started off the first half strong, ahead by a 14-point margin, putting up extra shots and improving to 35-19 going into halftime.
“We started off with a lot of intensity as far as picking up the ball from the jump,” senior guard Ricardo Maxwell said. “We made the extra passes. We were knocking down our shots, which made the game easy.”
Maxwell contributed 14 points, sophomore guard Brett Kingma added 13 points, senior center Mac Johnson had 13 points and Impero added 13 points. Senior forward Colby Mitchell led the team on defense with 11 rebounds.
A full team effort from the offense with four high scoring players and the strong defense, puts the Vikings at 4-2 on the season after this non-conference game win.
“Our defense was working well and our energy was a lot better than Wednesday,” Impero said.
Western’s strong offense is in part due to Parker who leads the team with a total of 120 points and averages 20.8 points a game. Maxwell adds 103 points and averages 17.2 points per game.
“We need to work on our rebounding because once we play teams that actually crash the board we’ll need to box out every time,” Maxwell said.
Western’s next and last games before the regular season are in Hawaii on Friday, Nov. 27, against Grace Bible followed by Hawaii Pacific on Sunday, Nov. 29.
The Vikings then come back to Bellingham to start conference play at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 3, against Saint Martin’s University at Whatcom Community College.
“[This season] I’m looking forward to winning a lot of games and hopefully getting that championship at the end,” Maxwell said.
