SCC Finds Life on Road Hard On and Off Court

Russ Davis, women’s basketball coach at Southern California College, felt his team needed to face tough competition on the road if the Vanguards were to break into the national rankings. So he scheduled a three-game swing in early December through Colorado against notable small-school opponents.

Davis knew the competition would be stiff, and he wasn’t bothered by losses to the University of Denver and Metropolitan State of Denver. Losing games was the least of his problems.

Things got off to a rough start just before the trip when sophomore guard Rachel Fiske aggravated torn cartilage in her sternum. She is out indefinitely.

Not long after arriving in Colorado Springs, where the team stayed at the home of freshman forward Allison Gruber, Gruber was rushed to the hospital for emergency appendectomy surgery.

The next morning, just before leaving on the two-hour drive to the University of Denver, freshman center Kelly Boeke, formerly of Fountain Valley High, senior guard Alana Kempton and senior forward Kristi Wright came down with flu-like symptoms that Davis attributed to altitude sickness.

With only eight players available, SCC was humbled, 79-34, at Denver.

“We were playing at 7,000 feet and it was crazy,” Davis said. “The players were going up and down the court two or three times and then we needed to sub them. It got so bad, we had to walk the ball up the court.”

Wright and Kempton returned to play two days later against Metro State, but SCC lost, 80-60.

Then the weather turned bad. Davis had to cancel another game at Adams State in Alamosa when a snowstorm blanketed the highway.

“It would have been a four-hour drive in the snow to Adams State and Coach Davis figured our 15-passenger van might get snowed in, so he canceled it,” said guard Marisa Emde, formerly of Marina High.

But Emde said there was a silver lining to the trip.

“Overall, it was a very fun, interesting trip, even with all those problems,” she said. “For a while, it didn’t look like we were going to make it through the week, but some of the girls were telling me that they still had fun and, hopefully, we bonded as a team.”

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Junior point guard Josh Giles of the Concordia men’s basketball team became the sixth player in school history to reach the 1,000-point plateau when he scored 14 points in Wednesday’s 68-59 victory over visiting Concordia University of Wisconsin.

Giles has 1,030 career points. He is averaging about 18 points this season, and over the course of his 76-game career, he is averaging 13.6.

“He is the heart and soul of our ballclub,” Eagle assistant coach Chad Kammerer said. “Each year we’ve asked him to go out and improve some aspect of his game, and he has done that and developed into quite a guard.”

Giles, who set a single-game school record by making 15 free throws (out of 18 attempts) against Holy Names, is within reach of the school’s all-time scoring leader, Mike Thompson, who scored 1,211 points from 1985-89.

Paul McLeod can be reached at (714) 966-5904, fax 966-5663 or e-mail Paul.McLeod@latimes.com