LYNN — Players in the Lynn Summer Evening Basketball program are counting the minutes until their championship game Thursday.
The program has been running since June 29 on weeknights. There are three levels for both West and East Lynn: elementary, middle, and high school. Jeff Byrd has been a director of the program for roughly 40 years.
Pizza Lovers, a team from West Lynn, will represent its age group at the championship. The team, in a recent game, won 28-12 against Johns Fuel Services, with Jauun Osorio scoring 12 points.
“I have four elementary, four middle, and four high school teams. We started the first week of June and we’re ending this week because Pop Warner Football starts next week. We don’t want to run into that because we lose a lot of players,” said Byrd.
“I’m getting ready to see if there is another team to play this team right now — to see who plays in the championship game. If the other team doesn’t show up this team will represent middle school from this site (West Lynn) in the championship. Then tomorrow, there (are) two teams at the other site (East Lynn) waiting to play for the championship.”
In the middle school group, Ward 6 Councilor Fred Hogan’s team lost 49-32 to Gannon Golf Course. Darren Rucker had a monster of a game, putting up 22 points with eight assists. Davon Rucker also had an amazing game with 18 points and four assists. Both play for Hogan’s team.
Geanni Ferreira who has been a director with the program for 10 years, has never seen the participation rates this low before.
“This is the smallest I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Usually the teams are all pretty full. It’s 14 per team and we have four on each grade level so four, four, and four on the East and then four, four, four on the West,” said Ferreira.
For the high school group, Get Straight took the win over Lynn DPW with a final score of 40-38. Isaac Medina scored 22 points and Tyler Kelly scored four for Get Straight. While across the court Alejandro Zorillo and Davon Rucker had 12 points with eight assists for Lynn DPW.
“The championship is at Marshall Middle school. Elementary starts at five, middle school starts at six, and high school starts at seven,” said Byrd.
Maddi Filip can be reached at [email protected].
