Unalaska, AK – The Raiders boys' basketball team bounced back from their Thursday evening loss to Barrow with a solid win against Kotzebue on Friday. The Raiders led the scoring for most of the game against a physically strong, sometimes rough team. Senior Cameron Lynch said the first time they faced Kotzebue was on the Huskies' home court.

"Kotzebue is always a good place to play. It's just really hostile," he said. "They don't want anyone coming in and beating their team. So they'll scream at you, they'll throw out cuss words out there. They just don't want us to win. We had a big lead in Kotzebue and it ended up getting down to four points. And we had some difficulties with their floor. Their out of bounds line is really small so we'd always being stepping out of bounds and their floor is really slippery we got it better there and we knew if they came here and we matched up with them there would be no way we'd lose on our home court."

And Lynch was right. The team went on the court with confidence and played strong offense and strong defense. In the end they won 53 to 27. He said their fouls were lower than normal as well - only nine for Unalaska and ten for Kotzebue.

The biggest downside of the game was a minor injury to Senior Mark Sorenson.

"I was dribbling base line and I gave up a fake and I jumped up in the air and threw it to Cameron and I got clipped from behind and fell on my back," Sorenson said.

He said his back is sore and he's not sure if he'll be able to play on Saturday. He's number six on the team and goes in after the starters.

The Raiders will play again Saturday at 1:30 pm against Bethel. Bethel beat Dillingham Friday afternoon 57 to 50. If the Raiders win that game they will face off in the evening against the loser of Friday's championship game between Barrow and Nome, the top two teams in the region.

The Lady Raiders, however, are completely out of the running. They faced Hooper Bay Thursday morning and their coach, Alan Haskins, said they played their best game of the season. The teams were tied at the half and tied at the end of the third quarter, but in the end, some of their weaknesses showed.

"Offensively they want to try to go out and do things on their own, but we aren't skilled enough to do that," Haskins said. "So you've got to be very disciplined on how you execute offensively and when they did that they did fine. When they tried to go out on their own it seemed to end up being turnovers. But, they played hard. They played defense very hard. We had our chances down to the end. With a minute or so to go we turned it over a couple of times when we shouldn't have, but it was a good game for us. Probably the best game all year."

The team lost 55 to 53 and is out of the tournament. However, the girls are a young team with eight sophomores and three freshmen and will have time to improve their game. Haskins says they just need to build their confidence and practice more.
"Many of them do not have enough confidence in their shooting. They just don't want to shoot the ball. And so they just want to get rid of it [by passing] as soon as they can. And that's something we've been working on all season."