By Nicholas Kolsin
The Men’s and Woman’s Basketball team had their annual “Moonlight Madness” game Thursday night. Before the festivities began, both teams unveiled their Conference Carolina’s Championship trophy’s to the fans of UNCP for the first time. The Women’s Basketball team received their rings before the games began as well including an appearance from former coach John Haskins.
Then, the games began. To start the night, the Men’s team had a dunk contest between various players. Forward Joe’l Pettiford got the nod for the craziest dunk attempt of the night trying to dunk over 6’11 Jonathan Kurtas three times. While being able to clear the giant Kurtas, Pettiford was not able to complete the dunk disqualifying him from the event. Sophomore Peyton Mann took home the win after dunking home a ball thrown off the side of the backboard by a teammate.
The Lady Braves were up first to show their talents in a 10 minute intrasquad scrimmage.
Senior Transfer guard Stella Mollica showed out for the gold team in this game. She finished with 8 points including a couple of nice layups in traffic and multiple assists in the ten minutes of play. For the black team, Kelci Adams picked up where she left off on from last year by hitting twice from deep and making 2 shots in the paint as well.
The Women start their title defense season on November 8 when they travel to Florence, S.C to play Wingate and Coker in the “Conference Challenge”. They will start Conference play on November 23 when they play Erskine.
The men followed up with an eight minute scrimmage as well and if you came here for tenacious defense and hustle plays, you came to the wrong place. The men were more focused on putting on a show for the fans with crazy dunks and deep threes than playing any sort of defense. Sophomore Dallas Garder seemed to have the most fun out there without the defense by dunking everything in sight on his way to the game high 18 points. Senior guard Bradlee Haskell hit two threes in the contest.
The Men have a fun challenge ahead of them when they travel to Canyon, Texas for the “D2CCA Tip-Off Classic” against two top teams in Division 2 Basketball, Ferris State, and West Texas A&M. They will also start conference play on November 23 against Erskine