With the conference tournament coming up, Sinclair Community College’s men’s basketball team is in a battle for first place and control of the conference.
Sinclair along with Cincinnati State community college and Cuyahoga community college is in a three-team race to see who can take home the regular season conference championship and earn the top seed for the conference tournament.
Head coach Jeff Price says his team views every game as a “one and done” situation because to advance they need to win every game.
“We have a set of goals we want to accomplish and, two of them are to have a home game in the conference tournament and to win it,” Price said, “To achieve both of those we need to win so we can make sure we don’t fall behind. “
On Feb. 16, Sinclair went down to play Cincinnati State in a game between the two conference leaders. At halftime Sinclair was up but that is when things went downhill.
“After halftime we had a couple incidents we had to overcome, Pat Crawford (Starting PG) got in foul trouble and our backup PG separated his shoulder, so we played about 12 minutes without a PG against one of the best pressure teams in the nation,” Price said.
Sinclair’s team played hard while playing out of position and held on to a lead late but Cincinnati State took the lead and didn’t look back.
“At one point they were up four and we had the ball. We made a turnover then they hit a three, then we missed a shot and they made another three so we went from down four to ten in about thirty seconds,” Price said.
Cincinnati State won the game 86-71 and took sole control of 1st place in the conference. As of Feb. 16 Cincinnati State conference record is 7-3 while Sinclair is 6-4.
Cincinnati State defeated Sinclair 59-83 on Jan. 29 at White Out Wednesday, so if they tied with Sinclair at first place Cincinnati State would own the first place tiebreaker.
“A lot of guys gave us good quality minutes, especially playing out of position,” Price said. “Unfortunately at the end of the night we were just on the wrong end of the score.”
Price believes that his team learned from this and other games that if Sinclair hard and within their system that they can compete with anyone.
Sinclair is still in line to get a tournament home game on March 1st if they finish in the top four in the conference.
“We have to make sure we take care of business in our final two games against Cuyahoga and Lakeland,” Price said. “Although we do have a home game in mind we’re not looking ahead to the tournament we are taking it one day at a time.”
If Sinclair wins there home tournament game they will go to Edison for the conference tournament semi-finals and finals on March 5.
“For me, a successful team is one that does well in the classroom and grows as men,” Price said. “But of course we want to win and if we stick to our game im sure we can do so.”