After jumping out to a 7-2 start in the first round of the NCAA Season 99 Seniors Basketball Tournament, San Beda University has now lost three of its last four matches, tumbling down to an 8-5 record — just half-a-game ahead of Jose Rizal University and 1.5 games against EAC and Perpetual.
What makes these losses tough pills for the San Beda community to swallow is that they came against teams in the lower half of the standings—squads the ever-dominant Red Lions should be dealing with easily.
San Beda stumbled against the ninth-place team, Arellano University, 72-74, fell short against the eighth-ranked San Sebastian College-Recoletos, 67-75, and on Friday dropped against the seventh-placed University of Perpetual Help System DALTA, 57-61.
To make matters worse for the Red Lions, they have very little time to lick their wounds as they enter a tough stretch of games against fellow contenders like Mapua University, College of Saint Benilde, and Jose Rizal University.
For head coach Yuri Escueta, part of the problem is the consistency in his squad’s readiness to step up, play their best, and follow the gameplan.
“Everyone needs to perform. If Jom (Puno) is off today, Pay (James Payosing) was off in the last game; so everyone needs to be accountable and ready to perform every game. Hindi puwede bungi-bungi, it needs to be a team effort coming from everyone,” explained Escueta to Tiebreaker Times.
“There’s still a lot of maturity that we need in terms of our mentality. I don’t wanna say they’re young, but these kinds of things usually happen with a lack of experience and maturity, overconfidence, lack of discipline in following the gameplan.”
Despite their shortcomings in the past few weeks, Escueta still preaches the same mentality he had when the Red Lions were atop the league: take the season one game at a time and learn from their slip-ups in the next game.
“When we were winning, we wanted to take it one game at a time. Now that we’re in tougher territory in the second round, it’s the same thing; our mentality is just to keep it one game at a time, focus, and make sure we do our best every game, execute, and focus on both sides,” shared Escueta.
“There’s always concern when you’re losing, but you need to be able to address that and keep improving on that in our next game. Whatever we thought we could have taken advantage of, however, we think we can improve, we’ll take a look at it, and how can we improve it next game. Ganoon naman lagi. You win some, you lose some, you keep moving forward.”
San Beda only has one day to rest and bounce back as it prepares to go up against Mapua on Sunday at 2:00 p.m.
