{"id":795,"date":"2012-01-15T17:57:10","date_gmt":"2012-01-15T22:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/?p=795"},"modified":"2012-01-15T17:57:10","modified_gmt":"2012-01-15T22:57:10","slug":"mhs-beats-hopewell-trenton-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/archives\/795\/","title":{"rendered":"MHS beats Hopewell – Trenton Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trenton Times<\/a><\/p>\n

By Anthony Coleman<\/p>\n

FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n

MONTGOMERY \u2013 Kris Grundy is about as surprised as everyone else.<\/p>\n

The Montgomery High boys\u2019 basketball head coach saw his team win for the 10th time in 11 games yesterday after taking care of Hopewell Valley, 62-44.<\/p>\n

\u201cComing into the year, we knew we graduated a lot of guys over the last two years,\u201d Grundy said. \u201cIt\u2019s a whole new cast of characters. We brought back Tim Maloney who was first team All-(Skyland) Conference last year, but he was our first guard off the bench. So we had a whole new starting five.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe brought back three guys who lettered, but this group of guys, to their credit, has worked their butts off from the time we lost to Trenton last year in the first round of the state tournament on a last-second shot until opening night, Dec. 16 against North Plainfield. They just worked and worked and worked. They came together. I\u2019ve been really proud of what I\u2019m seeing and how hard they\u2019ve worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Montgomery\u2019s balanced scoring helped it win for the seventh consecutive game. Junior guard Brandon Solomon hit all four 3-pointers he attempted in the second quarter to finish with a season-high 12 points as Times-area No. 8 Montgomery outscored the Bulldogs, 21-5, in the frame.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what happened,\u201d Solomon said. \u201cBut I\u2019ve got some great guys as teammates. They found me when I was open. I just finished it up this time. At the beginning of the game, coach told us defense is our biggest priority. I thought we took care of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sophomore swingman Justin Kovacevich added 11 points and six rebounds while junior Mike Rubayo netted 10 points and seven rebounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cGuys have been stepping up,\u201d Grundy said. \u201cWhen you start a whole new group of five, you never know who\u2019s going to step up. Justin Kovacevich is only a sophomore; he\u2019s further along than I thought he was going to be as a sophomore.<\/p>\n

\u201cBig (6-foot-7) Mike Rubayo in the inside has done a nice job rebounding the basketball and finishing around the rim. It\u2019s just guys stepping up and doing things for us that I knew that they could do, but I didn\u2019t think they would be doing it this soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopewell Valley received 16 points from Austin Fellows and 11 points from Austin Hill in suffering its fourth loss in a row, sixth in the last seven.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do see improvement,\u201d head coach Jeff Molinelli said. \u201cThe guys are working hard. It\u2019s just that we have one bad quarter that kills us. If we take that one bad quarter away in our games, we are in all these games that we are losing. If we keep taking steps forward offensively and put together a whole game, we will be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contact Anthony Coleman at acoleman@njtimes.com.<\/p>\n

MONTGOMERY 62, HOPEWELL 44<\/p>\n

HOPEWELL VALLEY (44): Austin Hill 3-2-4-16, Austin Fellows 5-0-1-11, Tom Hartshorne 1-0-5-7, Tom Hageman 1-0-0-2, John Croak 0-0-2-2, Zack Ward 2-0-2-6, Bailey Schrader 0-0-0-0, Chas Bell 0-0-0-0, Mike Barr 0-0-0-0. Totals: 12-2-14-44.<\/p>\n

MONGOMERY (62): Zaryab Ayub 0-0-2-2, Cameron Canty-Rodney 3-0-0-6, Zach Devinchenzo 1-0-0-2, Brendan Fay 1-0-0-2, Justin Kovacevich 3-0-5-11, Timmy Maloney 4-0-0-8, Mike Rubayo 5-0-0-10, Joe Shovlin 1-0-0-2, Brandon Solomon 0-4-0-12, Chase Ta 2-1-0-7, Greg Tarca 0-0-0-0, Chris Gamache 0-0-0-0. Totals: 20-5-7-62.<\/p>\n

Hopewell Valley (2-8)\t6\t5\t9\t24\u201444<\/p>\n

Montgomery (10-1)\t8\t21\t12\t21\u201462<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trenton Times By Anthony Coleman FOR THE TIMES MONTGOMERY \u2013 Kris Grundy is about as surprised as everyone else. The Montgomery High boys\u2019 basketball head coach saw his team win for the 10th time in 11 games yesterday after taking care of Hopewell Valley, 62-44. \u201cComing into the year, we knew we graduated a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mhsbasketball.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}