By Jeremy McDonald

jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

AURORA, Ore.–  They’re not the tallest, but they’re quick and can shoot the ball pretty damn well.

In their three games so far this season, all wins for the North Marion Huskies Boys Basketball team, the North Marion squad hasn’t scored less than 68 points a game.  Using their strengths in shooting and their scrappy play on defense to help propel them to wins over Estacada, Phoneix and Hidden Valley to start the season.

“It’s great, it makes basketball just better when your offense can score and helps you focus more on defense,” Cole Hammack said.  “We’ve been working on our defensive a lot.  We’re switching up defenses a lot, we go press to zone, we go man and just switching up every play and it messes up the other teams offenses.”

Hammack and Dawson Schrenk each contributed 24 points in the Huskies 70-52 win over the Mustangs of Grants Pass Saturday afternoon.  Fighting through the ebbs-and-flows of the game that saw Hidden Valley chip away their lead to single-digits twice in the contest.  Challenging North Marion to stay with it as they now turn their focus to road trips to Molalla (Tuesday) and Marist Catholic (Friday).

“We start good on the quarters and then we get a little lazy on defense.  But we stepped it up in the fourth (quarter) and allowed nine points in the quarter,” Hammack said.  “We got to stay focused and realize that, just because we’re scoring doesn’t mean we can play sound defense too.  Defense leads to offense.”

Nathan Greenberg and Joshua Iwamizu each scored 19 points for Hidden Valley.

Photos By Jeremy McDonald