Toros Cagers Lose Top Rebound Prospect : Coach Looking for More Help on Boards as Dominguez Hills Drops First 2 Games

The Cal State Dominguez Hills men’s basketball team plays at San Francisco State tonight at 8:15 and at Sonoma State Saturday night at 7:45 but will be without touted freshman forward Marty Ward.

Ward quit the team two days before Thanksgiving. He told Coach David Yanai that basketball was taking too much time from his religious practices. Ward is a Jehovah’s Witness.

According to a school spokesman, Yanai missed practice Nov. 23 and spent about three hours at Ward’s Harbor City home.

Ward plans to continue to attend classes at Dominguez Hills, but “there is no chance he will return,” Yanai said.

Ward was expected to provide the Toros with strength off the bench in the post area. Playing without him Monday night, Dominguez Hills was noticeably weak in its inside game in a 51-48 loss to Howard University. In the season opener, Ward scored 7 points and had 5 key rebounds in a 69-67 double overtime loss to Biola.

“My big disappointment is that Marty took all this time to tell us (that he doesn’t want to play basketball),” Yanai said. The veteran coach also said that it was discouraging to put in so many weeks of practice with Ward, then see it go for nought.

The loss of Ward is troubling to Dominguez Hills (0-2), which was expected to produce one if its best teams of this decade. Now Yanai, who was counting heavily on Ward for rebound strength, has to find another banger on the boards.

Most of squad’s big men such as 6-7 senior Anthony Blackmon and 6-4 center Brian Johnson feel more comfortable working from the perimeter.

In fact, Dominguez Hills will probably see a lot of zone defenses this season after poor offensive showings against Biola and Howard. The team seemed confused as to how to move the ball inside, preferring instead to take shots from 15 feet and out. Against Biola the Toros shot 46% from the field. In the Howard game Dominguez dropped to 39%.

Another candidate to post up is Kenyatta Kalisana, a 6-4 junior transfer from Marymount Palos Verdes Community College. Against Howard, Kalisana, a starter, scored 8 points and showed signs of proficiency inside the key offensively.

Blackmon, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder a year ago, will likely be most affected by Ward’s departure. Because of his offensive importance, Blackmon is now expected to play just about every minute of every game. Yanai had hoped he could rest his star center/forward by using an 8-man rotation. That seems unlikely now.

As for the poor start, that’s just an extra kick in the pants for Yanai.

“I really thought we’d be 2-0 at this point,” he said. “We should have won. We threw those games away.”