The best thing that Emmaus could have asked for following last week’s deflating loss to Parkland was a chance to get back on the basketball court. It may have taken three days, but the Hornets were able to erase their minds of that 76-63 defeat to their rivals on Emmaus’ home court.

Emmaus (12-2 overall; 9-1 in EPC) got back on the winning track with a 62-44 victory at Pleasant Valley (5-9; 2-9) on Friday night. David Kachelries’ game-high 34 points helped pace the Hornets from the opening tip.

“This was a big one,” Kachleries said. “We definitely needed it after a pretty poor performance by us against Parkland. We took two days of practice and really focused on getting back to what we do regularly during practice. We worked a lot on defense.”

“[We had] a 24-12 lead on our home floor, right where we want them, and we stop doing everything that was on the board in the locker room,” head coach Steve Yoder said following the Parkland loss. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been more disappointed with a team I’ve coached here after tonight.”

Yoder had watched his Hornet team start out fast against Parkland, taking a 10-point lead after eight minutes. But then he saw that lead diminish in the second quarter and turn into a Trojan 36-33 lead at half, before the Trojans led by as many as 16 points in the fourth quarter.

“We were pretty devastated,” Kachelries said. “We didn’t want that to happen at our home court with our whole crowd there cheering us on. We just had to get over that and get ready for the next game. And we took it out on Pleasant Valley.”

“We stopped finding guys in transition,” Yoder said. “We allowed them to shoot threes. We got impatient on offense and jacked up shots, even though we had the lead and there is no shot clock. Instead of taking a 10-point lead to 12 or 14, we let it get back to six and then by the end of the half all of it is gone.”

Kachelries, one of the Hornets’ unquestioned senior leaders, had a large part in the early going against Pleasant Valley. He scored Emmaus’ first 12 points and had 15 of the team’s 20 in the first quarter. That early 20-11 lead grew to 30-16 at halftime, and the Bears did not get within single digits the rest of the way.

In between the Parkland game, where Kachelries shot 1-for-6 from three-point range, and the Pleasant Valley contest, he and his shooting coach tweaked his mechanics a bit. The result was a 34-point effort with three three-pointers.

“I was making a little mistake in my shot,” Kachelries said. “My coach helped me fix it. And he told me when I went up to Pleasant Valley and scored 30 to thank him.

“I was pushing my shot a little bit. I wasn’t really pulling my hand back to where it normally was. I just went back to my old shot basically. It was minor fixes.”

Matt Kachelries, who scored 15 points against Pleasant Valley, scored nine in the second half to keep the Bears at a distance. The twins scored 49 of Emmaus’s 62 in the Pleasant Valley game.

Results from Tuesday’s game at Nazareth were not available at time of press.