Santos is playing unselfishly and ELAC hopes to up its men’s hoops game

ROSEMEAD – You can call Matthew Santos a lot of things. But there’s one thing you can’t call him: selfish.

Santos, a senior point guard with the Don Bosco Technical Institute boys’ basketball team, might have scored 28 points in the team’s opener against San Gabriel High recently, but that’s not the lone part of his game.

“I prefer getting an assist than scoring,” Santos said. “It’s an unselfish attitude and it’s my point guard mentality that everybody gets the ball and gets the open shot.”

At first glance, Santos doesn’t look like he has much stature on the court – he stands just 5 feet, 5 inches tall – but he makes it all count.

“I started playing competitively when I was in the sixth grade,” said Santos, who lives in Pasadena. “My dad always had a ball with him and we’d always shoot around. We still shoot around.”

He added he actually uses his lack of height to his advantage on the court.

“I don’t think (other teams) take me seriously, but once they see me creating opportunities for my teammates and hitting shots, they start taking me seriously,” Santos said.

He also said he enjoys playing for coach Dominic Sermeno.

“I like how we have a good relationship,” Santos said. “It’s more than a coach-player relationship. We can just talk about anything, like colleges, possessions, where I can play and stuff like that.”

Sermeno also had kind words for Santos.

“He can score without a doubt, but he’s also unselfish,” Sermeno said. “What he cares about is the team winning, whether that’s him knocking down the shot or finding a teammate.”

AFTER FINISHING IN FOURTH PLACE A YEAR AGO, East Los Angeles College men’s basketball coach Rob Rivera is hoping to improve upon that record.

“We feel like the biggest things we have are more depth and more size,” Rivera said. “That’s what’s coming in.”

So, who are these players?

“We have a returning center who was all-conference last year – Rafael Morelos – but he’s a little undersized so we really felt we needed to bring in someone to help him with some size and that’s Mark Torres.”

While Morelos is 6 feet, 5 inches, Torres stands at 6 feet, 10 inches.

And what about Torres? Rivera hopes the kid will come into his own this year.

“He had a 22-point game recently versus Citrus College,” Rivera said about Torres. “But he’s been inconsistent and has just shown a small glimpse since then. But he’s a kid who’s being recruited – as is Morelos. With Mark we just need consistency and stability. He just hasn’t shown those things for us.”

Rivera added look to Deon Geary and Albert Chavez to have great seasons.

“Our leading scorer is Geary,” Rivera said. “He’s a sophomore. He’s a combo guard. We need his offense so we need him to score more.”

And on Chavez: “He gives us a lot of energy on both sides of the ball and he’s probably our best shooter. He’s a good three-point shooter. He’s very much an energy player, plays good defense.”

Rivera added he’s hoping this ELAC team will make it to the postseason in 2012.

“We had a really good summer,” Rivera said. “We only got to play eight exhibition games in the summer and we won seven of them, so we put down a standard of playoffs to be our goal.

“We feel like we’re competitive with everybody in the conference. With us it’s just going to be about can we find a collective leadership effort. If we can come together then we will be the team we’re supposed to be.”

THE SCHURR HIGH BOYS’ SOCCER TEAM IS OFF TO a great start and rubbed that in Temple City High’s face on Tuesday with an 8-0 nonleague romp at home that included six second half goals and seven different scorers.

Midfielder Thomas Rodriguez got the scoring going at the 28-minute mark. After he was fouled, he scored on a penalty kick he put into the lower left-hand corner of the goal.

Alex Granados scored nine minutes later as he took a pass across the middle to the wide right of the goal before putting it in the net to make it, 2-0, at the half.

Forward Miguel Ajtun put in two goals of his own at the 57- and 68-minute marks in the second half to seal the victory.

However, Schurr coach Tomas Haynes said there is still more work for the team to do.

“We still haven’t played 100 percent,” Haynes said. “We need to work on conditioning – more running, more getting into shape. We look good, but we got to get better defensively.”

And how will the Almont League season look?

“It’s going to be Montebello, Bell Gardens and us again this year,” he said. “It’ll come down to who makes the fewest mistakes.”

Shel Segal is president of Arcadia, Calif.-based Segal Communications and sports editor of the West Valley Journal (Calif.). He can be reached at ssegal@segalcomm.net.

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