If Westgate’s run to the semifinals in football had one negative effect, it was the delay in the basketball team having its entire roster together for the first part of the season.

Since the football team members returned last week, the WHS basketball team is starting to get its roar back, as evident in Tuesday night’s 88-70 win over LaGrange.

According to WHS coach Oliver Winston, it’s not quite all the way back yet but it’s coming together nicely.

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“We’re still not as efficient as we need to be,” said Winston. “We gave up 70 points tonight. We still haven’t gotten together and got in a good rhythm.

“The guys from football haven’t got their basketball legs yet. The effort’s there, they’re playing hard, it’s just that defensively we’re not doing some of the things that we need to do. But as we play more games and accumulate more minutes, everybody gets in shape.”

Missing one starter in Raymon Jones, who is out with a minor leg injury, the Tigers still managed to get out to an early lead and pull away for the win to improve to 10-5 on the year, heading into Ellender’s Tournament this week.

“We shot the ball well early and got a lot of people involved offensively,” said Winston. “I think that offensively we’re OK because we have a variety of scorers.

“I thought that Tre’ (Eaglin) got us into offensive sets the way we wanted to. We didn’t execute quite as well in the post as we wanted to but we did a fairly decent job of getting points, we just didn’t make stops.”

It’s just a matter of time and minutes before the Tiger machine is humming again.

“Being in football shape and being in basketball shape is two different things,” said Winston. “It’s just a matter of them getting more games under their belt and getting up and down the floor. They’ll get in basketball shape, I guarantee that.”

For not being in basketball shape, the Tigers played well against the visiting Gators.

Westgate outscored LaGrange in every quarter and built leads of 20-16 at the end of the first period, 47-41 at halftime and 69-55 by the end of the third quarter.

Tyrunn Walker took up some of the slack from the missing Jones and led the team with 19 points, Jacoby Colbert and Deon Anthony each had 14 points and Al George and Eaglin each had 11 in the win.

LaGrange coach Cary Collins was unavailable for comment after the game.

“Tonight we were hurt a little bit because Raymon has a little injury,” said Winston. “I think that the kids are growing together.

“Raymon had a little bump on his knee. Nothing serious but we’re going to sit him out a couple of days and make sure that he heals up.

“You can’t win anything in December so we want to make sure that we are in good health for January, February and March.”

Leonard Lambert led LaGrange with 21 points and John Guidry had 12.