Mineola Basketball Shoots Down Division 80-48

The strategy Levittown Division basketball coach Jim Curcio employed Tuesday night was a simple one: when you’re facing Mineola away, stop Malcolm Brown and Mike Waszczuk.

“We didn’t do it,” he said on the other side of 32 minutes, a 80-48 loss hanging around his neck. “We weren’t mentally prepared for today’s game.”

For the past three days Jim Hegmann had been talking about shot selection. Coming off of a , he had been drilling the aspect of shot selection into his basketball players all weekend.

“We did a lot of shooting,” the Mineola varsity boys basketball coach said. “It paid off.”

Mineola must have been smiling looking at their game-end statement: 30 baskets, 12 of them coming from behind the arc, half of those owned by junior guard Malcolm Brown.

Not a bad way to open up the of your season schedule.

“They made some very good shot selections,” Hegmann said. “It was a lot different than what you saw (against Garden City).”

Brown would not have the massive explosion that he had in the season’s first match, being held to 25 points on 13 shots, but making six of them from field goal range and five from the line.

“I love it,” Brown would say after the game when asked if he ever got tired of hearing his name following “three pointer” over the loudspeakers.

Waszczuk went 13-19, racking up four treys on his way to 32 points, a career high.

“Coach told me to come into the game, be ready to shoot the ball, catch it in the pocket and that’s what I did,” Waszczuk said.

Last year Waszczuk had been more of a second half player, putting together runs in the third.

“I basically told him ‘if you don’t have a good first half, you’re not playing until the second half from now on,” Hegmann said. “He got it straight.”