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YSU’s Slocum: ‘To me, this is Christmas’
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
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YSU men's basektball coach Jerry Slocum
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
When finals end, Christmas begins for YSU men’s basketball coach Jerry Slocum.
“Our tough focus week is finals week,” said Slocum. “That’s a hard, hard week. You’ve broken your routine, you’re not meeting with them every day.
“That week is tougher than now. Now it’s all basketball. They’ve got no classes. We’re with them twice a day, with shooting practice and regular practice. To me, this is Christmas time because you get to spend a lot of time with the guys.”
YSU (5-5) will play its last game before Christmas when it takes on Kent State tonight at the MAC Center. The Golden Flashes have won three straight in the series, with the Penguins’ last win coming on Dec. 22, 2006.
“They’re only 45 minutes away, so there’s always kind of a feeling that we’ve got to prove we can battle with them and beat them,” said YSU senior forward Vytas Sulskis.
Kent (8-3), which has the best record of any team in the Mid-American Conference, will play without its second-leading scorer, junior guard Carlton Guyton, who was suspended indefinitely this weekend after being charged with stealing a woman’s car last week. Police are also reviewing the woman’s allegation that she was sexually assaulted. Guyton was averaging 12.7 points per game.
Still, YSU’s biggest concern is junior Justin Greene, a 6-foot-8 power forward averaging 17.8 points and 7.6 rebounds per game. While the Penguins don’t expect to shut him down completely, Slocum said they need to keep him off the foul line and the offensive boards.
“They might have the best player that we have faced this year in the Greene kid,” Slocum said of Kent. “He’s just an excellent player and has put up large numbers on everybody that they’ve played this year.”
YSU has lost four of its last five games and is 0-5 on the road but Slocum said the team has only had one bad road outing, a 30-point loss to Robert Morris that came on the heels of finals week. In their last outing, Penguins led at North Carolina State with about eight minutes left before faltering down the stretch, 67-50.
“During this stretch of [four out of] five on the road, we’ve really played very good basketball,” Slocum said. “We just haven’t finished games.”
Sulskis, who is averaging a team-best 16.5 points per game, took part of the blame for the team’s late-game struggles, saying he and fellow returnees Dan Boudler and Ashen Ward need to show more leadership.
“[But] I think we’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ve just got to take care of business [tonight] so we have some momentum and enter the second part of the season feeling better about ourselves.”