San Francisco • A significant earthquake rocked the Bay Area early Thursday morning, giving the BYU basketball team an unexpected jolt at its hotel in downtown San Francisco.
Coach Dave Rose and BYU basketball sports information director Kyle Chilton said they were among the estimated nine million people who felt the 4.4-magnitude earthquake, which was centered east of Berkeley, Calif., along the Hayward fault, one of the most worrisome in the region.
It hit at 2:39 a.m. PST, about 18 hours before the Cougars defeated San Francisco 69-59 in a West Coast Conference game. Rose told Chilton that he was awake at the time and felt it immediately. No players reported feeling it as they slept at the JW Marriott in Union Square.
It was BYU’s first true road game since the 75-66 win at Utah State on Dec. 2, and first game outside the state of Utah since a Nov. 25 game against UMass in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“In the next eight weeks, we are going to be out [on the road] four or five times,” said Rose. “We have to go out there and win, go out there and play well. Usually, if you go out and play well, you win.”
The Cougars were able to bounce back from their third loss, a 74-64 overtime setback to Saint Mary’s, by executing down the stretch after the Dons took a brief lead midway through the second half.
“I think our team is much improved from Nov. 9 when we started,” Rose said. “We improved all through December, and hopefully we can continue to improve all through January.”
Good times on The Hilltop
San Francisco’s War Memorial Gymnasium remains the only venue in the conference where the Cougars have not suffered a loss since they joined the league in 2012-13. They are now 7-0 in the quaint cracker box on the USF campus that locals refer to as “The Hilltop” and have won 10 straight overall against the Dons.
“I don’t know if there is any explanation [for BYU’s success in San Francisco],” Rose said before the game. “If you went back and looked at the times of the games, the timing of it, what was going on in certain parts of the season, sometimes that has a lot to do with it.”
Rose joked that he would like to take a couple hours and ask reporters questions like that.
“But I on’t know if I would listen to your answers,” he said.
Briefly
The Cougars wore the same royal blue uniforms that they wore in a pair of instate battles, wins over Utah State in Logan and Utah in Provo, and are now 3-0 in them this season. … Rose played nine guys in the first half because Childs and fellow big man Luke Worthington got into foul trouble. He said after the game that freshman Rylan Bergersen has played well in practice and deserves more playing time… BYU led 33-26 at halftime, the 10th-straight game in which they’ve led at the break. USF’s leading scorer, Souley Boum, did not score in the first half and finished with seven.
