The women’s basketball team matched up against their rival Long Beach City College on Feb.23 and lost 68-59 to end their 2023-2024 season.
It was a pretty close game all night and tensions were high because if Cerritos had won they would have been tied for first in the South-Coast Conference South Division with Long Beach.
At the end of the game, the Vikings won and started celebrating their perfect 8-0 conference record, some words were exchanged between coaches and a fight almost took place.
No one realized what was going on until LBCC assistant coach, Dionte Chappell, yelled out to the Cerritos assistant coach, Joe Pacheco, saying, “What’s up my guy.”
Pacheco was seen just walking away from the altercation as Chappell started to charge into Cerritos players and had to be held back multiple times by his team and others.
Pacheco said Chappell had been taunting and bad-mouthing the Cerritos team all night so he told him he was being a bad sport.
“I just walked by and go ‘you know you’re very unsportsmanlike’ and then he just went off on me,” Pacheco said.
Besides the disturbance at the end of the game, the game was engaging and even emotional for some as they were celebrating four sophomore players.
Each player was announced and given flowers, a goodie bag and a bigger basket filled with items and their name and number on it.
Sophomore forward, Miah Nayback has been on the Cerritos team for the last two seasons and explained what it was like to be recognized by her coaches in front of the crowd.
“It felt very emotional, I’ve been playing for all my life basically and it felt sad that it’s ending,” said Nayback, “but I loved playing the sport for the two years that I was here and I love the coaching staff and my teammates.”
After this, the game started and it was a close one all night. Cerritos led the first two quarters and went into halftime up 28-25.
The second half of the game is where the Falcons started trailing as they came up five points short at the end of the third quarter.
They would go on and fight as hard as they could but would eventually fall to the Vikings.
Getting into the playoffs was going to be difficult even if they won the game but head coach Trisha Kozlowski still acknowledged their great conference run compared to the record they had previously (11-15 overall and 6-2 in conference).
“Second place in conference that’s something to be really proud of…right until the end the kids never gave up, I couldn’t be prouder of them,” she said.
Although the Falcons lost they kept it a tight game for the most part against the Vikings, especially since the last time these teams played against each other Long Beach blew out Cerritos.
Kozlowski explained the approach they had before this final game was for everyone to show up.
