<\/p>\n
Girls’ basketball is a strange thing\u2014with the way the schedule is structured, teams play elite tournaments in the early winter, then their league schedule, and then the postseason. <\/span>Effectively, the tournaments decide a lot of the jockeying for national title position, so teams contend first for the national title, second for their league title, third for the CIF section title, and fourth for the state title. <\/span>In order of difficulty, that goes hardest, easiest, and then the middle two\u2014very strange. <\/span>In other words, girls’ basketball is the one sport where, if you’re going for the ultimate prize, losing early is the worst<\/em> thing you could do.<\/span><\/p>\n It’s a lesson the Long Beach Poly girls’ basketball team knows well, and they fell in the semifinals of the Nike Tournament of Champions, losing 56-51 to Mater Dei. <\/span>The Monarchs outscored the Rabbits 21-14 in the second quarter and led through the second half.<\/p>\n Poly was able to pull within three points with thirty seconds left, thanks to a deep bomb from Ariya Crook-Williams, but missed a shot to tie it, and the Monarchs hit enough free throws to hold them off. <\/span>Poly coach Carl Buggs said the biggest differential statistically was from the charity stripe, where Poly was 3\/6 and Mater Dei was 13\/19. <\/span>“I’m not blaming it on the refs,” he said, “We could’ve done a better job of attacking the basket, but it just didn’t happen. <\/span>It was a good game by both teams.”<\/p>\n Poly will advance to play Brea in the third-place game Tuesday evening, as St. Mary’s was able to come back from down by six with just twenty-five seconds to go to defeat them.<\/p>\n Stat leaders for Poly were Sheila Boykin with ten points and eight rebounds, Ta’Nitra Byrd had eight points and ten boards, and Brittany Wilson had eight points.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Long Beach Poly’s national title hopes took a blow in the semifinals of the Nike Tournament of Champions on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2516"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=2516"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}