Sacramento State Recreational Sports held its annual Basketball Blowout & Intramural Basketball All-Star Night on Saturday at Yosemite Hall.

The Basketball Blowout is a Rec Sport special event designed to showcase the skills of the best players of the five-on-five basketball intramurals and kick off the intramural playoffs, which begin this week, and will continue through the rest of March.

Recreational Sports Assistant Coordinator Ryan McCallum said this event has been going strong for five years and that Rec Sports is continuously seeking to expand and include as many players as possible for the event every year.

The players who are chosen to be the all-stars are selected by a committee that evaluates the top players’ statistics during the exhibition games and it makes its final decisions based on a player’s conduct on the court and their availability to participate in the event.

The night’s events included two three-point contests, one that was open to the general public and a separate one for the all-stars. The winner of the public three-point shootout was allowed to then compete against the all-stars in their three-point contest.

A slam dunk contest was also to have been a part of the event rotation, but McCallum said that there were only a few players who showed interest and opted for a different event.

Instead of a dunk contest, a skills competition was introduced in which players had to demonstrate their ability to dribble around cones, complete bounce passes through hoops and perform layups within the fastest time possible. Time penalties were added to a player’s time for failures to go around all the cones, cleanly pass the ball through all the hoops or successfully complete the layups.

Adam Scheiner won the three-point competition with a score of 21 points while Daniel Green earned a win in the skills competition with a time of 18.5 seconds.

But the main event for the night was the all-star game comprised of two teams featuring the best 10 players from each of the two brackets of the five-on-five intramurals. The brackets were divided by the days of the week that the teams signed up to play on, meaning that the players were chosen to represent the teams playing on either the Monday/Wednesday bracket or the Tuesday/Thursday bracket.

The Monday/Wednesday bracket had the comparative advantage, being able to pick from the rosters of 28 teams while the Tuesday/Thursday bracket had only 14 teams to pick its players from.

The all-star team of the Monday/Wednesday bracket held a large lead over the Tuesday/Thursday bracket the majority of the first half but the Tuesday/Thursday team managed to close the gap and entered halftime with a score of 37-30 in favor of Monday/Wednesday.

Monday/Wednesday capitalized on numerous breakaways to widen the gap by 20 points early in the second half of the game. But the numerous fouls committed against Tuesday/Thursday that resulted in multiple penalty shots helped pave the way to a rally that brought the score to 71-69 in favor of Tuesday/Thursday with only seconds left on the clock.

In the last seconds of the game, Adam Scheiner, who played for the Monday/Wednesday team, was fouled and given the two penalty shots that, along with another breakaway basket, sealed a victory for Monday/Wednesday with a score of 74-71.

The MVP of the all-stars was Haron Hargrove, who came away from the game with 32 points, four rebounds and three assists.

The next Rec Sport special event is the Outdoor Soccer Tournament. The team entry deadline for this event is by 5 p.m. today with the first game starting on Friday.

Justin Tejada can be reached at [email protected]