Boys basketball: Naches Valley 56, ROYAL 41

ROYAL CITY - A team with young talent is still in essence inexperienced and it continues to show for the Royal Knights.

The Knights dropped their third game in a row to start the season in a 56-41 loss to Naches Valley Tuesday.

"We are still only firing on half our cylinders but we are moving in the right direction," Royal head coach Pete Christensen said. "The kids are working hard to improve, but we are always playing catch up to the teams that play a lot of summer ball."

Danny Vermeer led Royal with 21 points while Abel Castellon and Neil Leitz chipped in with six points apiece.

Royal trailed 14-10 at the end of the first quarter but were then outscored 16-6 in the second eight minutes and had to play catch up the rest of the way.

"Defensively we are at about 80 percent with our lapses coming from our play in the low post," Christensen said. "We are giving up a lot of easy buckets underneath the basket.  This should be a fairly easy problem to fix.  Patience, rotation and ball movement are the key elements we will be working on offensively."