January 14, 2025
By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X
Three days after the Whitney High boys basketball team posted its first win ever against Cerritos High, the Wildcats were looking to make it two in a row against the only other team to have won the 605 League in its short existence. But Artesia High had plans of ruining that part of school history, maintaining a lead for the entirety of the second half.
Seven players scored for the Pioneers, the 12th time in the first 14 games that has happened, and they posted a 44-39 victory last Friday night. Artesia has now won all 13 meetings against Whitney since the league was formed in 2019, but this was just the second time the margin of victory was in single digits. Last season, the Pioneers barely escaped with a 31-27 win and this meeting lived up to the hype, according to both head coaches, considering the Wildcats have been an up and coming program the past three seasons.
“Yeah, it was a good game,” said Artesia head coach Jeff Myles. “Whitney is a good team; it’s not the Whitney of old. The coach coaches them hard and has them run all kinds of different stuff. They run kind of a matchup zone, so it’s kind of a funky defense. It’s not your traditional defense, but Whitney is a good team, and we weren’t looking past them.”
“Definitely, I expected more out of us, by far,” said Whitney head coach Nasir Akmal. “They did a great job; [Myles] did a great job of getting his guys in their spots. We had quite a few lapses on defense that killed us, especially with the threes.”
Artesia led by a narrow 7-5 score five minutes into the contest before beginning the final 2:43 of the quarter on a 6-5 run. Whitney senior Peter Poitras then began the second quarter with a three-pointer, tying the game, and a minute later, sophomore Jezreel DelaCruz put his team in front for the first time with his second perimeter basket of the contest.
After being held scoreless for the first 2:21 of the stanza, the Pioneers made a charge to regain the lead and keep it. It began with a three-pointer from junior Kobe Young, then baskets from senior Jaylen Reed and junior Christian Stewart and finally a trifecta from senior Jovell Tate as the hosts led 23-17. The half ended with a three-pointer from Poitras, but adjustments were made in the half that benefited the Pioneers (9-5, 2-0).
“That’s the game of basketball; basketball is a game of runs,” said Myles. “With a good team, they’re not going to hold. If they’re not a good team, they’ll probably quit. It’s a game if runs [and] they kept playing. We took some bad possessions, but they’re a good team and good teams are going to make plays.”
One of the differences in the first half was Whitney’s tall player, junior Shayan Saravanakumar picked up two fouls in the first quarter and was summoned to the bench. He returned in the second half, only to get five rebounds and a pair of blocks while picking up two more fouls in the fourth quarter.
“Against a team this big, we need him,” said Akmal. “Officiating is officiating, but I didn’t like how it favored one side. We definitely felt like that, at least from one of the refs. But that’s not to take away…[Myles] did his job. Regardless of that, we need to do our job.”
Whitney would stay within two possessions in the opening minutes until another downtown basket from Tate began a 12-6 run that gave the red and black a commanding 39-31 lead with 3:20 left to play.
Still, Whitney (8-12, 1-1) refused to go away quietly and with the score 42-33 with 1:23 left in the game, senior Morgan Marks drained a three-pointer 20 seconds later. Stewart would score off his third offensive rebound in the quarter before DelaCruz ended the game’s scoring with a three-pointer with 21.3 second remaining.
“We have to make adjustments, and we did, and we had opportunities,” said Akmal. “We scored on some, but we didn’t score on enough. [Tate] just lit us up and we were supposed to take that away. That’s one of the lapses I’m talking about.”
Marks led the Wildcats with 13 points and six points while DelaCruz and Poitras each added nine points and three rebounds as all the points came from the starters. Senior C.J. Okeke quietly led Artesia with 13 points, six rebounds and two steals while all nine points Tate scored came from three-pointers. Stewart had another banner day coming off the bench with eight points and as many rebounds.
“He’s solid; he’s a very good player,” Myles said of Marks. “He can handle it and kind of gets his team going. He’s very good defensively, and very good aggressively. But I thought what hurt us today was [Poitras]. He hit some really big shots. We had him on the scouting report as one of the shooters, but we kind of let him get loose a couple of times.”
Even though Whitney has never beaten Artesia, the gap between the two has been closing. Of the previous 12 meetings, Artesia won 10 of them by at least 20 points with half of those anywhere from 32 to 40 points. Artesia will visit Pioneer High on Friday and Whittier Christian High on Saturday before hosting Warren High on Monday and Oxford Academy on Wednesday. Whitney will host Oxford Academy on Friday before going to Cerritos on Wednesday.
“I told our guys this game is more about the environment than anything else, and it was,” said Akmal. “There would be certain points in the game where we would look up [at the scoreboard] and it would be a three-point game. But the way the crowd was reacting, it felt like it was a 20-point game. And in the past, it would be like that. So, we had to mentally lock in more and understand the situation as far as outside of the noise, we still had to play and understand and be confident.”
“Like I said, we’re about eight or ten-men deep,” said Myles. “Jovel was kind of struggling early, but in the second half, we ran a couple of plays for him to get some looks and he a couple of [threes]. Then big Stewart brought us home at the end and had some big offensive rebounds and big finishes.”
