The Pelican Rapids boys basketball team had a busy week as they played three games starting by hosting Crookston on February 7.

The Vikings trailed by 4 at the half 37-33, and the Pirates were able to pull away in the second half for a 75-61 win.

“Defensively, we didn’t play as a team well enough to prevent Crookston from getting easy looks on offense,” head coach John Gullingsrud said. “The Pirates made 12 threes on the night as we weren’t able to stay in front of the ball which led to open kick-out threes for them. They have too many good shooters to just give them open looks like we did.”

Pelican Rapids was led on the offensive end by Jacob Gottenborg, who had 18 points on the night. Zack Sjolie and Oakley Kress were also in double figures with 12 and 11 points, respectively. Kress led the Vikings with 7 assists, and Sjolie led the team with 5 rebounds. As a team, Pelican Rapids was 27-61 (44%) from the field and made only 3-21 (14%) threes. Crookston edged the Vikings on the glass by a 32-29 margin.

“Our own shooting woes definitely did not help us as well in this game as we couldn’t get anything to fall from the outside,” stated Coach Gullingsrud. “Crookston is one of the top four teams in our section, and we felt like if we could have gotten a few more stops on defense, we would have been right there at the end of the game.”