Glendale Goes Cold in Loss to El Camino

For a while it looked as though the Glendale College men’s basketball team was going to pull off the biggest win of an already surprising season.

With six minutes left in a second-round game of the Southern California regional junior college playoffs, against defending state champion El Camino, the Vaqueros held a seven-point lead. In fact, Glendale had led since midway through the first half.

Then, the Vaquero offense went into hiding. In the last six minutes of the game, Glendale managed just two points and wound up losing, 64-60, at El Camino.

“We were setting up plays for guys to get open, but the shots just weren’t falling,” said Glendale forward Dave Swanson, who led the team with 17 points.

During that final six-minute span Glendale missed four of five field-goal attempts--including one air ball--two free throws and turned the ball over four times. The Vaqueros’ sole field goal was a jump shot by Gary Fowler that gave Glendale its last lead, 60-58.

“It wasn’t their defense,” Glendale Coach Brian Beauchemin said. “We were just turning the ball over. . . . The game shouldn’t have been coming down to the final seconds. We should have been winning by six or seven points.”

El Camino, which had won three state titles in the past nine years under Paul Landreaux, now an assistant at UCLA, tied the score, 58-58, on a free throw by David Keeter with 3:07 remaining.

Forward Kevin Mixon, who finished with a team-high 17 points, gave El Camino the lead for good with a 14-foot jump shot with 1:19 left.

After a timeout, the Vaqueros turned the ball over on their next two possessions, but El Camino (22-8) missed chances to put the game away by missing the front end of three consecutive one-and-one situations.

Glendale (20-12) still trailed by only two points, however, when guard Vigen Serop launched a three-point attempt with 10 seconds left. But the shot missed everything.

Justin Lord came off the bench to score 14 points for Glendale and center Alex Berry added 10. Fowler chipped in with nine points.

Center Charles Evans had 15 points and Vander Meyers added 13 for El Camino.

After getting off to a sluggish start--the Vaqueros turned the ball over on four of their first five possessions--Glendale took a 23-16 lead on a three-point basket by Swanson. El Camino closed the gap to 25-22 on a turnaround jump shot by the 6-foot-7 Evans, who had 10 first-half points. But Glendale rallied to extend its lead to 35-26 at halftime.