Arch Scurlock

Sports Reporter

The defending Virginia Community College champion men’s basketball team began its season in early November. Duplicating last season’s success, however, is not a given as most of last year’s team is gone. The only holdover players are forward Jonathan Ball and the injured Andre Allen. Jamal Fair returns from the 2009-10 team.

The team includes 11 freshmen and three new sophomores, all from the Washington, D.C. area. The team continues to be coached by sixth-year coach Mike Fitzmaurice with assistant coaches Sean Fitzmaurice, Michael Abdlejabbar and Joe Shoemaker.

Results to date have been close to last year’s team, which started 4-5. Through seven games this year, NOVA is 3-4.

NOVA’s first game was a big loss at 103-88 to a strong Hagerstown Community College team on Nov. 2. Next, in a tournament Nov. 4 and 5 at Catonsville, Md., NOVA notched its first win, over Chesapeake (Md.) College 100-86 before falling to the Community College of Baltimore County-Catonsville 77-70.

NOVA’s first home game at Annandale ended in a close 81-80 win over the College of Southern Maryland on Nov. 16. NOVA went out to a 41-36 halftime lead, led by Ball with nine points and Dominique Phillips with eight.

In the second half, NOVA streaked out to a 16-point lead 63-47 with about 14 minutes to go, but the game was not over. CSM came back to within six at the 10-minute mark and closed to within two at the five-minute mark.

NOVA continued to keep a small lead and led by two with a little over a minute to go, 79-77. NOVA’s Jamal Fair took a bad shot, and CSM made a basket with 23.9 seconds to go to gain a tie, 79-79.

After a timeout, NOVA worked the ball around, and Steve Pierre received a nifty pass and made a layup to put NOVA up 81-79 with 5.7 seconds left.

A timeout was taken and CSM inbounded the ball. Bringing the ball up the court, the CSM player was unable to get the ball to the free CSM player under the basket as he fumbled the ball under pressure. However, NOVA fouled with 0.7 seconds to go on an attempted shot. CSM’s Daniel Henry, who had already scored 20 points, had two foul shots to try to send the game into overtime. Looking a bit uneasy, Henry made his first foul shot but his second bounced off the front of the rim, and NOVA rebounded as time ran out, allowing them to escape with the close win. Pierre led NOVA with 17 points, and Ball added 16.

Coach Fitzmaurice exclaimed afterwards, “We’ve got a good ball team. We’ve got good ballplayers. They made a lot of mistakes, but we’re early in the season. As the season progresses, we think these mistakes will be minimized and we can play the kind of ball we did last year.”

“We did the same thing last year,” he said of not starting out well.

On the game tonight, he remarked, “We’ve got to practice a lot harder our fundamentals. We committed too many fouls. We turned the ball over too many times, and that let CSM stay in the game.”

Next, NOVA traveled to Baltimore on Nov. 26 and easily beat CCBC-Dundalk 100-74 in a typical run-and-gun NOVA win.

The weekend of Dec. 3 and 4 shaped up as quite a challenge for NOVA. The team traveled to North Carolina for the Davidson County Community College Storm Classic prepared to face two teams with a combined 15-2 record.

The first game saw NOVA fall to Davidson 87–73. The next day, in a slower game, NOVA fell to Spartanburg (S.C.) Methodist College 60-56. NOVA’s record thus sat at 3-4.

The remainder of December will see NOVA still on the road, playing four games, including two in New York. They return home Jan. 7 and 14 for two games before going on the road for four more away games.

By: Arch Scurlock

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