Beckman holds off Corona del 55-44 in a battle of former PCL boys basketball rivals

Beckman’s Tommy Feldman guards CdM’s Jack Stone during Wednesday night’s non-league game.

Old Pacific Coast League rivals Beckman and Corona del Mar met up Wednesday night in a non-league boys basketball game at Beckman.

Beckman had a bit too much offensive firepower, led by center Aaman Soma, who scored 18 points and grabbed 19 rebounds to lead the Patriots to a 55-44 victory. Beckman remains in the PCL while CdM goes to the Sunset League this year.

Dylan Thoerner added 14 points for the Patriots (5-2).

“Their box and one, I’ll admit it took me a little while to try and work through that, trying to figure out how I could get the ball to the other guys,” said Beckman Coach John Goins. “Soma has been having a great year for us because typically their other team’s big guy has to to guard (Christopher) Muller because he’s a great low post threat and you put your best defender on Thoerner so that opens up Soma, who is a very solid player and he gets to take advantage typically of either a smaller guy or somebody he can muscle around a little bit. It’s a tough match-up for teams. He got a lot of rebounds and a lot of offensive boards today.”

CdM led 13-10 after the first quarter but Beckman got untracked in the second stanza sparked by the solid play of Soma.

“We started off slow, but then we picked it up,” Soma said. “We really wanted this win. CdM was always a tough match-up when they were in our league and we got a chance to play them even though they’re not in our league anymore. Toward the end, they started coming back but we just kept fighting.”

Beckman led 29-25 at halftime and extended the lead in the third quarter outscoring Corona del Mar 16-9.

CdM (1-1) was led by Matt Olson and Jack Stone with 12 points each.

The Sea Kings made a late run, cutting the Beckman lead to 47-40 with 2:43 left in the game, but that was as close as the Sea Kings could get.

“We talked about keeping them off the boards; we knew they were big and physical and a lot more thickness than we have,” said CdM Coach Ryan Schachter.  “We wanted to try and do our best on Dylan and I thought we did a really good job on Dylan for the most part, he got loose in the third quarter. Other than that, I thought we did a great job on Dylan. We got hurt on the rebounds. Our keys were limit Dylan and keep the other guys off the boards, especially their three big guys. And we weren’t able to do that.

“They’re just really physical and we didn’t have the make-up to be that physical, not right now.”

CdM will welcome football players Ethan Garbers and John Humphreys to the team soon.

“I think we’ll be better on the boards, especially when we play a team like Beckman,” Schachter said. “We got great shots, we just didn’t make them. Even in transition, we good got shots and we didn’t make them.”

It looks like the two teams will continue to meet in the future.

“I maybe would have traded this one for one last year,” Goins said. “I’m happy that Ryan wants to still keep the games going because they’re always good and they always run their stuff well and they’re good kids to play against.  We had great games against them over the last few years.”

-Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com