Invertebrate basketball racks up two losses for LCA

Call it Jellyfish Ball.

The Lighthouse Christian Academy won its first four games of the season. Then after point guard Jeri Ballard was pushed from behind during a game and landed on chairs off court, injuring his ankle for the season, the Saints boys basketball hasn't recovered.

"All our guys are playing with great effort and great heart," said Coach David Horowitz. "We've got to make more shots. We've got to create more shots. We've got to be a little more organized. You've got to go out there with a plan as a group. If you don't have strength as a group, if you don't have structure and discipline, then you don't have a 'basketball backbone' that can hold up over the course of 32 minutes of high school basketball.

"We need to take out their backbone," he added. "They need to not take out our backbone. The backbone is what holds everything together. You have to have resilience. You have to have discipline to face pressure, difficulties. We're getting better and better at that, but we still have to have to make room for that."

First Lighthouse lost on Monday 52-57 to Santa Clarita Valley International Charter School. Then on Tuesday, they lost to arch-rivals Hillcrest Christian School of Thousand Oaks 38-55.

In Monday's game, LCA squandered a 15-point lead in the first half against SCVi. In the third quarter, the Saints collapsed, netting 3 points, while SCVi came to life with six 3-pointers.

"It was a terrible quarter," Horowitz said.

In the fourth quarter, the Saints came all out with competition to finish off victorious. But a bad call awarded a ball to SCVi in the final seconds of the game.

"Coming out of the game the night before where we had the tough loss, we knew (on Tuesday against Hillcrest) that we would either come out like gangbusters or have a real tough time because we were coming off a tough loss," Horowitz said. "Unfortunately, it started the second."

Lighthouse went down early by 20 points under a Hillcrest press.

"We just couldn't fight our way our of it," he said. "It was a horrible start."

After tallying the sizable deficit, the Saints finally pulled together their strengths and crawled out of the hole.

"We started playing our game," Horowitz said. "And we came back and started scoring. We were playing tough and closing the gap."

Then Lighthouse seemed to run out of gas, and Hillcrest capitalized to again run up the score.

"There isn't one guy on the team that doesn't play with amazing effort," Horowitz said. "But we gotta make more shots. We gotta create more shots. We gotta be a little more organized. That being said, we've got the guys to do it. We expect to continue to improve."

The backbone will come as they continue to train.