By Justin Sokeland
WBIW.com
BEDFORD – Little ditty about Jace and Parker, two American kids shooting in the heartland. For this hit performance, they were gonna be basketball stars. And life went on, long after the pain of losing was gone.
After collecting their thoughts for a moment at intermission, as a Cougar named Mellencamp was letting it rock, Bedford North Lawrence’s Jace Nicholson and Parker Kern did the best they could, combining to save the downtrodden souls of the Stars.
Rallying from a halftime deficit with a fantastic opening chorus to the third quarter, BNL ended a frustrating two-game skid with a 66-56 victory over Trinity Lutheran on Tuesday night. Kern scored 18 points and Nicholson exploded from a shooting slump with 14 as the Stars (3-6) stormed to a victory in the series debut, recording their first home triumph of the season.
Trailing 32-28 at the half, the Stars erupted. Nicholson turned a Kern steal into a layup, Kern crashed the baseline for a 3-point play, then scored on a pinpoint pass from Dax Short in transition. Short buried a trey to cap the electric run to a 42-32 advantage in less than three minutes.
From that point, BNL rumbled to a 19-point lead in the fourth quarter, thanks to Jett Alvey’s banked-in bomb to conclude the third quarter and Driven Axsom’s two corner treys. After two losses with such poor shooting in the tournament at Southridge last week, BNL hit 9 treys total and converted 20 of 34 shots during the final three periods. That’s more like it.
“Any time you’re a shooter and in a slump, it’s good to see the ball go in the hole,” BNL coach Jackson Ryan said. “For all of our guys, for the valley and low point we were in, you could tell it meant something to them.”
For the Cougars (5-6), the third quarter was doom. BNL allowed only three points. The other three quarters, Trinity Lutheran was the winner. But that’s why there’s four.
“That’s been an enigma for us,” Lutheran coach Mike Lang said. “We have a quarter where we lose our focus, our intensity, don’t play as hard as we should. It’s a really disappointing performance.
“It goes back to being soft. We played a very soft eight minutes. We didn’t play the way we did the other 24 minutes. There’s no moral victories. We played hard for 24 minutes, we outscored them for 24 minutes, but at the end of the day, they kicked our butt for 8 minutes.”
If the Cougars could have replicated the first four minutes, they would have blown BNL off the court. Junior wing Reed Mellencamp drilled his first three shots during a 9-0 opening. BNL didn’t score until Nicholson swished a trey at 3:32. And if anyone needed that, it was Nicholson. He had been almost invisible during a four-game skid. That first one led to three more baskets in the second quarter as BNL battled back to take a 28-25 lead on back-to-back Nicholson bombs.
“We’ve all been waiting on it,” Nicholson said. “Everyone has been giving me confidence.”
Wonder what the halftime speech was to inspire the comeback? In reality, it was the same as the pregame speech. Perhaps it sunk in. Those first three minutes of the second half constituted BNL’s best time frame of the season thus far.
“We didn’t get our butts chewed out,” Nicholson said. “We just came out and played hard.”
In addition to the backcourt scoring, Gibson Crane muscled his way to 11 points and 9 rebounds. Axsom, making his first career start, hit three treys for 9 points.
On the other end, Mellencamp was sensational with 24 points and 9 rebounds. But BNL’s best defensive work was blanketing Lutheran scoring leader Hudson Lang, who was averaging over 21 points per game. He was limited to 6.
“He’s the No.1 target on the scoring report, he has to be mentally focused and ready to go,” Lang said.
“Lang is a great player,” Ryan said. “We did a great job on him. Driven and Parker did a great job of guarding the perimeter.”
BNL also won the rebounding stat by a 33-24 margin as Short added 7 boards. The Stars had a season-low 8 turnovers.
”We tried to keep the ball moving and play with pace,” Ryan said. “Once we got that lead, we were able to spread them out and attack. When we can control it, good things happen. If we can make teams chase us, good things happen.
”This can’t be a one-time thing. We have to keep this going. No matter who we’re playing, we have to be the same in everything we do.”
”It was a big win,” Nicholson said. “Everyone wants to be a part of something like this.”
BNL (3-6) will host Columbus East on Friday.
TRINITY LUTHERAN COUGARS (56)
3s FGs FTs R F Pts
2 Reed Mellencamp, f 2-5 9-16 4-5 9 3 24
21 Bode Brooks, f 1-1 1-2 0-0 7 3 3
33 Logan Schepman, f 0-0 0-0 0-0 1 1 0
1 Hudson Lang 0-5 3-12 0-0 2 0 6
23 Braxton Sinclair, g 1-1 3-8 2-4 2 1 9
5 Isaac Darlage 0-1 0-1 0-0 0 2 0
15 Luke Schepman 2-2 2-4 0-0 1 3 6
24 Ross Bevers 1-1 3-3 1-1 0 0 8
Totals 7-16 21-46 7-10 24 13 56
BEDFORD NL STARS (66)
3s FGs FTs R F Pts
24 Gibson Crane, f 0-0 4-8 3-3 9 2 11
5 Dax Short, g 1-3 2-7 2-4 7 2 7
1 Parker Kern, g 1-4 7-12 3-3 5 1 18
11 Jace Nicholson, g 3-4 5-6 1-2 1 1 14
2 Driven Axsom, g 3-4 3-4 0-0 1 5 9
40 Ben Conner 0-0 1-5 1-2 6 3 3
10 Easton Moore 0-3 0-3 1-2 1 0 1
12 Dayson Kirby 0-2 0-2 0-0 2 0 0
23 Jett Alvey 1-1 1-1 0-1 0 0 3
Totals 9-21 23-48 11-17 33 14 66
Trinity Lutheran 14 18 3 21 – 56
Bedford NL 8 20 21 17 – 66
Turnovers – Trinity Lutheran 7, BNL 8
Field goal percentage – Trinity Lutheran 21-46 (.457); BNL 23-48 (.479)
Free throw percentage – Trinity Lutheran 7-10 (.700); BNL 11-17 (.647)
