Golden opportunity awaits Westlake on Friday

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Opportunities like this don’t come around very often, not for the Westlake boys’ basketball team. Friday night’s Marmonte League game offers this group a chance to do something few teams have this season: Defeat Simi Valley, a program that’s lost one game thus far and is ranked No. 7 by The Times.

Confidence should not be a problem for the Warriors. They did, after all, only lose by two-points in the first meeting in early January. Playing on the road, in a hostile environment, certainly doesn’t help the cause for the first-place Pioneers, who could be ripe for an upset.

It’s not as if Westlake played a soft schedule either. It has quality victories over Chaminade and Oxnard to go along with a couple of hard-fought losses to Harvard-Westlake and Santa Clara. But ultimately, those experiences could end up being the difference between making a statement with a victory, or not.

--Sean Ceglinsky