St. Viator dumps Wave

It was time to shake things up after the half-court-centric St. Viator boys basketball scored an average of just 38 points in back-to-back losses to Hersey and St. Patrick.

"Our emphasis this week in practice was to get out and run on offense and score some more points," St. Viator senior Michael Landyut said. "And we did."

The Lions broke out of their scoring drought by breaking the St. Edward press with regularity for easy transition buckets.

Combined with tenacious help-side defense that limited St. Edward leading scorer Brett Manning to 7 points on 1 field goal, the run-and-gun strategy lifted the Lions to a convincing 72-40 victory in Elgin Wednesday night.

The win snaps a two-game losing streak for the Lions (3-5), who sent the Green Wave (4-5) to their fifth straight defeat.

St. Viator ran the press break to perfection in the first half, riddling St. Edward's pressure for easy basket after easy basket in taking leads of 20-9 after a quarter and 56-28 at the half.

The Lions hedged toward the transition game all night.

"After a shot went up they were pretty confident they were going to get the board, so they would send a sneaker out there and we didn't get back in time," said Manning, whose only basket in 9 attempts was a 3-pointer in the fourth quarter.

Lions senior Eric Huber had a field day in transition. He scored 8 of his 11 first-quarter points on the run en route to a game-best, 20-point outing. The rest of the scoring was distributed between 11 Lions.

"This week we decided to be a little more up-tempo," St. Viator coach Joe Majkowski said. "It worked tonight. We'll see what happens when we go to the Wheeling Tournament next week."

The underlying story in Wednesday's game was St. Viator's overwhelming physicality. Using a starting lineup made up mostly of football players, the Lions were able to muscle the more pliable Green Wave at will.

"I think right now it's the culture of our basketball program," said second-year St. Edward coach Keith Chuipek. "They don't know what it is to play hard or play physically. At some point for us to turn this around, they will have to do that. I cannot do that for them, or they're going to keep getting their butts kicked like they got kicked tonight and like they got kicked against Driscoll (a 69-45 loss).

"It's not going to get any easier when we go Saturday night to Jacobs (7-1). They're going to be right in there doing the same thing."

St. Edward, which had scored 44 percent of its points this season from beyond the 3-point line, shot 1-for-19 from the arc.

Riley Coleman led the Green Wave with 9 points and Steve Martin added 7.