Teams

Georgetown:
Trailing 7-0 less than four minutes into the game, Coach Thompson called a timeout. Two minutes later, and the Hoyas had taken the lead 9-8, and they never looked back.

With the result no longer in question, JTIII used this game as an opportunity to try out different players and allow them to play in a competitive atmosphere without bringing back the starting five to help them out when they struggled.

Savannah State:
The Tigers started out strong, seemingly unphased by the #19 ranking that the Hoyas came in with, and jutted out to an early lead. After Georgetown started scoring, however, it became clear that the team was simply outmatched. Nevertheless, Savannah State kept fighting for 40 minutes, and put forth a much better showing than they had one year prior.

Players

Georgetown:
Jason Clark had a career-high 14 points and he hit a career-high four three-pointers, all in the first half. After the game, he was asked about his personal achievement, and he didn’t know that he had passed his previous best. Neither did Coach, but this is what he had to say about #21:

Jason is at the core of what we’re doing this year, and his role is significantly different this year than it was last year. So 14 is a career high – he’s gonna exceed that many times this year.

Savannah State:
Nobody for Savannah State really stood out from the rest. Freshman Tracy Baugh led the team in scoring with ten points, but all of those points came in the first half. Senior Tracy Rankins scored nine points, and while he didn’t have the best shooting night, he definitely came across as the team leader.

Fans

I haven’t done enough research to 100% verify this, but I’m almost positive that this was the first time a nationally ranked team played at Tiger Arena. So in the first big time home game for an independent school, I thought the students did surprisingly well at showing up and making the atmosphere exciting. There was a section of students who had their whole bodies painted and were very loud throughout the game, especially during the opening 7-0 stretch. (Check out what they did before the game started)

Also, a fair amount of Georgetown fans made the trip, and while they never got raucous or anything, it’s good to see the Hoya faithful supporting the team wherever they go.

Number of the Game

11: Number of minutes that Vee Sanford played. As I said in my opening bit on the teams, this was a game that Coach Thompson used to try out new players, and this was the first opportunity that Vee got to play significant minutes. He obviously was a little uncomfortable out there to start, but with his extended minutes, he started to show what he could bring to the table defensively and also offensively, scoring his first basket as a Hoya.

And here’s what Coach had to say:

I thought that Vee was very good, particularly at the defensive end. He and Jason are two of our better defenders – they’re very similar in body type as well as determination and sticktoitiveness… It’s good to see him out there and good to see him get settled in.

(I’ll post the full audio sometime soon.)

Long Tall Hoyas

For the last few minutes of the game, Georgetown had what I would have to describe as the lankiest team I’d ever seen. Jason Clark, Vee Sanford, Hollis Thompson, Nikita Mescheriakov, and Henry Sims all have very long arms and very narrow bodies, so if you added up the total wingspan of the five players on the court for the Hoyas, and divided that number by their waist size, you’d get a number somewhere roughly around infinity.