By Dean Vaglia

Leader Staff Writer
Varsity basketball returned to a packed Oxford High School Ian Smith Gymnasium last week as the boys lost to the Berkley Bears on Friday, Feb. 4.
The loss put an end to a full week of basketball for the boys and a truncated week for the girls, who were only able to play their away rematch against the Bloomfield Hills Blackhawks on Tuesday, Feb. 2 after their Thursday game was snowed out. The girls once again beat the Blackhawks with a similar score to their O’Rena contest, 45-35.
“This has been a long road of having a ton of road games for us,” Rachel Breyer, varsity girls coach, said. “We were really excited to play this week on Thursday at home but obviously that did not happen. So looking back on Tuesday’s games and knowing that it is one of our last on-the-road games, I was pretty happy with their effort.”
Breyer says around 40% of the girls’ shots against Bloomfield Hills came from the field. Junior guard Miranda Wyniemko had one of her best offensive games, scoring 22 points with nine rebounds. Freshman forward Nevaeh Wood had a strong game with eight points and seven rebounds.
“Our freshmen Sophia Raab, Nevaeh Wood and Allison Hufstedler are doing a great job contributing to the stat line, which is nice to see,” Breyer said.
Defensively the team cut Bloomfield Hills’ post-player’s point performance nearly in half. While she scored nearly 20 points at the O’Rena, she scored just 10 last Tuesday.
“We handled it a lot better than we did the first time around,” Breyer said. “We, moving forward, are going to take what we learned from this game and push it into Rochester.”
While the girls took on the Blackhawks, the boys faced down the Rochester Falcons and came home with a 48-44 win.
“[Rochester] hit four threes in the first quarter,” Steve Laidlaw, varsity boys coach, said. “We just kept battling in and kept making plays … It was kinda back and forth in the third and fourth [quarters] and then – I want to say it was 30-some seconds to go – we were down by one and Bryce [Esman] hit a big three. Then we got a stop, they fouled us, Jake Champagne hit a couple of big free throws and we won the game.”
Esman, a senior center, put up 18 points while Champagne, a freshman guard, put up 10. Senior forward Mitchell Viviano also had an impressive offensive game, putting in a double-double on points and rebounds.
One improvement the boys made was cutting down on their turnovers issue, letting the Falcons take the ball 13 times and Berkley only 10 times. But with Berkely, many of the turnovers became big gains for the Bears en route to a 48-59 loss.
“Even though we only had 10 turnovers for the game, which is fantastic, we gave up nine points off our live turnovers,” Steve Laidlaw, varsity boy’s coach, said.
Logan Rozanski scored seven points and 11 rebounds while Esman scored 20 points and 11 rebounds.
This week sees the girls take on the Falcons in Rochester on Tuesday, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. and begin a long stretch of late season home games starting with Berkley on Thursday, Feb. 10 at 5:30 p.m. The boys have back-to-back late-week road games, starting with the Berkley Seaholm Maples on Feb. 10 at 7 p.m. and a neutral-field match against the Stoney Creek Cougars at the Little Caesars Arena on Friday, Feb. 11 at 1:45 p.m.
Tickets to the LCA game can be purchased at gofan.co/app/school/MI10050, and the Detroit Pistons are providing OHS students, faculty and close friends up to six free tickets to that night’s 7 p.m. game against the Charlotte Hornets. Information on getting your tickets can be found at Pistons.com/OxfordStrong.