By Jonty Ralphsmith
The Pakenham community is encouraged to get down and get loud on Saturday night, with the Warriors taking on Warrnambool at Cardinia Life in an elimination final at 7pm.
The men are coming off a 19-point win against Coburg, described as their most complete performance for five weeks, and have beaten Warrnambool in their two meetings this season.
“I promise the boys are absolutely going to bring it this week,” coach Rob Roberts said ahead of what is expected to be a sellout crowd.
“If people want to see a good game of basketball, this week is the week to do it.”
Pakenham’s season has been built around the dominance of Josh Dow, Joe Davis and Ned Weideman.
Weideman showed his form on the weekend by standing up when the game was there to be won, while Davis and Berkec are among the premier big men in the competition.
Others such as Brenton Charles and Michael Johns have come in and played important roles.
Both teams have a 13-7 record this season.
The opposition players to watch are player-coach Alex Gynes, Jamal Pollydore, who is second for points per game in the league and Oliver Bidmade, second for rebounds per game.
There is a watch on whether Gynes will play after being unsighted since injuring himself in the round 15 game between the two clubs.
Bidmade used his height well that day, with 19 points and 17 rebounds, while Pollydore is averaging 27 points this season.
He averages 20 points against the Warriors and his two-point shooting percentage is more than 10 per cent below his overall average.
“We play a lockdown role on him,” Roberts said.
“We try to keep him off the arc and get him to put it on the floor. He’s a player we’ll respect and won’t let get off the chain.
“In the last half of the season, we’ve been fairly beat up and the bodies are fairly sore, but for us, it’s about our movement.
“We think we’ve got the fitness and pace to outrun these guys over the course of 40 minutes.
“And our physicality – ‘Berko’ is physical at 6’10 and has started in the last few weeks so that’s pretty handy.
“When we actually get our game together, we’re fairly unstoppable on both ends; 84 points is about what we need to score to beat these top teams and we need to keep them to 65-70.”
The youth women are also in finals action, on the road in a do-or-die game against Wyndham.
Meanwhile, the youth men’s season has come to a close after Maccabi defeated Whittlesea on the weekend.
The Warriors defeated Albury Wodonga on Saturday which had them in a finals spot on Saturday night, before Maccabi displaced them in an overtime win the following day.
Coach Braden Venning is proud of his team’s grit.
Having won just one of their first nine games, partially due to an administrative error leading to five games being taken off them, Venning’s men won nine straight just to be in calculations.
“We were up against it, but locked in and had a heap of guys step up against the odds, buying in to everything I was teaching,” Venning said.
“I think we could’ve got to finals and shaken things up. It was really cool to see us beat the top teams.”
Venning, who coached the squad to a 2-0 grand final loss in 2022, said he believes the team has progressed beyond the point they were at last year.
Cooper Lanting is in the mix for the league All Star five and Dylan Jenkinson, league-leader for assists, for golden hands.
Venning touted Lanting, skipper and ‘on-court coach’ Jenkinson, Matt Stevens, 6’8” Pereira, and Kaleb Beveridge to push for senior minutes next season, alongside Johns who is already getting game time.
