Metea Valley hands Lake Park fifth straight loss

If Metea Valley's boys basketball team has heard it once they've heard coach Bob Vozza's order 1,000 times after defensive rebounds and turnovers.

"Go!"

The Metea transition game kicked into gear to beat host Lake Park 60-47 in a DuPage Valley Conference game in Roselle.

"The key was basically getting out and run, looking for our shooters, looking for Malik (Hall) down low, creating something out of nothing, basically," said Mustangs point guard Montrell Oliver, conducting a lot of it.

"We like to go at that pace and we'll continue to do so, try and get some easy baskets," Vozza said.

Dealing Lake Park its fifth straight loss, Metea Valley (12-14, 7-7) saw a 7-point third-quarter lead dwindle to 37-35 entering the fourth.

The Mustangs answered with a 9-0 run spearheaded by always active Dei'Ron DeLaRosa, who scored 11 points including 7 for 9 from the foul line. Then 6-foot-5 sophomore Hall, limited to 4 first-half points, hit a pair of 3s and converted a three-point play to spread the margin to 55-41 with 2:11 to play.

"My teammates, they were pretty much all open, so they just kept taking their shots," said Hall, who finished with a game-high 24 points.

"And in the second half I started getting smaller people on me inside, so they started looking for me and I just started getting hot. And then they kept feeding me the ball."

Lake Park (14-9, 8-5) remained without injured leading scorer Kenny Bogus and forward Andrew Vega. The Lancers led once, briefly, on a first-quarter 3-pointer by forward Bailey Vance, who scored 15 points.

Center Mitch Jarosinski led Lake Park with 18 points. It was Jarosinski inside, Vance and Garett Fant who led the home team's third-quarter charge.

"We needed to get back in transition, which we didn't do that well," Vance said. "We couldn't rebound the ball, we got killed, (Metea) probably doubled us in rebounding. We just couldn't match up in transition, they got layups every play."

Aiming for consistency, Metea Valley has won four of its last six games after taking a three-game losing streak in mid-January.

"(In the) fourth quarter they seemed to put us in situations we've been in the past and not succeeded, but we kept attacking," Vozza said. "Malik obviously got hot and those guys out there got the ball in the right spot."