City Basketball : Fairfax Starts Slow but Gets Past Venice

Fairfax High Coach Harvey Kitani figured his team gave up too many easy baskets in the first half, and star sophomore Sean Higgins admitted that the Lions might have taken Venice for granted at the start.

The top-seeded team in the City 3-A basketball playoffs, Fairfax led by only eight points at halftime, 29-21.

The Lions’ play early on, especially that of senior forward Tony Thomas, was hardly shabby--it just wasn’t as impressive as what followed. Not much could have been, though, as Fairfax turned the rematch of its one-point, double-overtime win two weeks earlier into a rout by outscoring Venice, 24-12, in the third quarter to win, 71-51, in a first-round game at Fairfax.

Venice, an at-large entrant into the playoffs after finishing fourth in the Western League, led after Oliver Lang’s basket 21 seconds into the game but never again. Fairfax (The Times’ No. 3 team with a 22-1 record) led by three points at the end of the first quarter and eight at the intermission before turning it on at the start of the third, outscoring the Gondoliers, 8-0, in the first minute and 18-4 over 3:35.

Thomas virtually could do no wrong in the first half, when he scored 18 of the Lions’ 29 points and added a nifty assist on another basket. He finished with a game-high 26 points on 11-of-14 shooting and displayed quickness, strength and agility, like the time he knocked the ball away from a Venice player and rolled down the court for a slam dunk.

“The last four or five games he’s really put it together,” Kitani said. “He is a senior, and he has shown that by rising to the occasion.”

Higgins, a 6-8 center with great leaping ability, is still more than a year shy of his senior season, but that didn’t stop him from getting from rising to the occasion. After hitting two of his five field-goal attempts in the half, he played a much-improved final 16 minutes to finish with 23 points.

“I expect that kind of play from him,” Kitani said. “So his play in the end didn’t surprise me too much.”

Robert Bibbs led Venice (10-14) with 27 points.

In the girls’ 3-A playoff game, Park West League runner-up Fairfax (13-8) got 34 points from Dee-Dee Davis and 27 from Shameil Coleman to defeat Canoga Park, 78-51.