The Cavalier daily :: Wednesday, January 6, 1971 :: University of Virginia Library

Virginia's basketball Cavaliers
will take the floor in
Blacksburg tonight with their
best won-lost mark in years, a
long rest period behind them,
and a desire to be ranked
among the twenty best teams
in the country. Their opponents
will be the Virginia Tech
Gobblers, losers of six of their
nine games and once defeated
by Virginia, 68-59 in the finals
of the Big Five Tournament.

Cavalier boosters may be
tempted to ask "Well then, who do
we play on Saturday night?" but
overconfidence on the part of
either players or fans is probably
unwarranted. This year's Hokie
squad is possessed of two excellent
ballplayers and, with a little help
from a so far undistinguished
supporting cast, Lloyd King and
Alan Bristow could send the Cavs
back to Charlottesville losers.

King, a 6-1 guard regarded as a
great shooter and good field general
and Bristow, a 6-7 forward from
Richmond who leads the team in
rebounds as a sophomore, both
average around 19 points per game
and Tech partisans claim that it was
King's absence (he played very little
and scored only two points) that
made all the difference in Virginia's
Big Five win.

Other Tech starters include
Charlie Lipscomb, a 6-7 center who
makes up in muscle what he lacks
in finesse, Tommy Trice, a 6-6
forward from E.C.Glass High who
usually turns in an adequate performance,
and Wayne Lockett, a
senior guard who's had as much
trouble with his GPA as with his
PPG in his VPI career.

Although the season is still
young, Tech's slow start has made
the Virginia game and the ones
immediately after it a "cold turkey"
period for the Gobblers. With
a .500 record all but insured by an
easy schedule, Tech Coach Howie
Shannon would rest easier with a
few wins to pad his present 3-6
mark. An ally of Shannon's will be
the fact that the game is in his own
Coliseum where the Gobblers are
81-16 overall. No state team has
won in Blacksburg since 1957 when
Richmond turned the trick.

Virginia appears in fine shape
for the contest. Front-liners Bill
Gerry and Scott McCandlish,
averaging over 36 points per game
as a tandem, lead a corps of fifty
per cent plus shooters that was able
to run 107 points up on William
and Mary. Improving Barry Parkhill
14.2 average and the author of 45
assists, and Tim Rash form an ACC
caliber backcourt with Frank
DeWitt rounding out the starting
five.

A freshman game, featuring Virginia's
Bob McCurdy, a 43-point
scorer last time out, precedes the
varsity contest.