Men need to find their stride

The Saints men lost Wednesday night to Portland Community College, 87-80.

The defeat dropped Mt. Hood to 2-4 in NWAC South region play, and 8-8 overall on the season.

It wasn’t a bad day for everyone: Saints sophomore forward Cody Thompson had a good game, scoring 17 points and pulling in nine rebounds. Sophomore guard Elijah Fuller scored 13 points, and had two steals. And freshman point guard John Tibbs came away with five steals.

The team has struggled, though, not just Wednesday but their last few games. They’ve lost four of their last five, all of them South contests. Considering that this team set high goals, the recent struggle hasn’t been easy.

Sophomore forward Luke Anderson described the team’s mood. “We haven’t been playing well lately. But that’s the thing – we know we are a good team; we just haven’t reached our potential yet,” he said. “We did set high goals because we have high expectations for ourselves and we wanted to set these goals to push ourselves to get better.”

Anderson pointed to how the team can rebound from the loss. “We were pretty bummed last night because we knew it was a big game for us but we are going to have two good practices the next two days and have a good game on Saturday.”

MHCC will host Southwestern Community College in Gresham, the first of four straight home games, a chance for the Saints to get right.

Tipoff is at 4 p.m. Saturday.

Fuller said the Saints believe they’re a much better team than how they’ve been playing. “We have dropped the last three games, to teams that we should have beaten,” adding that as team they didn’t prepare correctly for the Portland game.

Fuller isn’t ready to erase the possibility of winning the conference, however. “We set very high goals to win conference and win the NWAC this season. Obviously we have to get back on track and play how we were before Christmas,” he said. “We as a team know that we have to win every game now to have a shot of winning the conference.”

The overwhelming sense from Saints players is they won’t let the rough start knock them down. They believe in their talent on the court.

“At least that is our mindset – we have to stay positive and be together as a team,” Anderson said. “We can’t do it individually but together as a team, a family, we can.”