The Lincoln Land Loggers started their season traveling to Rockford, IL to take on the Rock Valley College Golden Eagles. The Loggers lost with a final score of 60-96.
The Golden Eagles drained a three-point bucket on the first possession of the game and then never gave LLCC any ground to catch back up. Lincoln Land was forced to call two early timeouts to try to stop their slide and stay in the contest. Trailing 27-15 the Loggers put together their best run of the game. Over the next three and a half minutes Lincoln Land scrapped together a 9-0 run and found themselves only down 3 still trailing 27-24. Rock Valley immediately responded with a 10-0 run and closed the last 4:00 of the half on a 14-4 run to go in to the halftime break leading 41-31.
The second half was no better to the Loggers who after each 5:00 stretch saw the game get further and further out of hand. The Loggers trailed by 10 at half, 14 with 15:00 to go, 25 with 10 left, 29 with 5:00 to go, and then fell by the eventual 36. Things that hurt the Loggers in the first half became major problems in the second half. The Loggers were outrebounded by 23, something that became worse as the game went on, 16 offensive rebounds for the Golden Eagles turned in to 18 second chance points for Rock Valley. Lincoln Land could not put enough stops and scores together to make the contest any closer.
Statistically the story was the same as the game, LLCC was dominated in all aspects, getting the bad combo of being outshot and out-rebounded. The only stat category the Loggers were better than the Golden Eagles was turnovers, committing one less on the afternoon. Camren Kincaid led the game in scoring with 22, but was the only Logger able to get to double digits. Kincaid also dished out a game high 5 assists. Beyond Kincaid, Axel Laby and Nick Cook were both able to get to 9 points on Saturday afternoon.
After starting 0-1, although the effort turned sour quickly, the Loggers do have plenty of areas to improve, something they’ll have to works towards quickly as they head back out on the road Wednesday night against St. Louis Area Community College.
