Spartans looking for other scoring options
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
It’s safe to say that most high school basketball teams that have had the last 18 days away from game action are going to come out of the holiday break with something different, a new wrinkle or two. The Emporia High boys have been trying to find a new offensive player or two, so they’re not so heavily dependent on two or three players on that end of the floor.
As the Spartans (3-2) have been prepping for tonight’s post-holiday schedule-opening trip to Topeka West, they’ve been looking for ways to get some new guys involved on the offensive end — specifically, people other than guards Taylor Euler and Jacob Torres and center Greg Canales.
Those three players have combined for 229 of the Spartans’ 278 points in their first five games. Euler is averaging 21 points per game, Torres is averaging 14.2 and Canales is at 10.6. No other player has more than 14 points on the entire season.
Coach Rick Bloomquist usually makes some adjustments during the holiday break, after he gets an early look at the makeup of his team. This year, he’s made what he calls some “twitches” to the offense to try to give it more flow and continuity.
“I think our defense, for the most part, has been pretty respectable,” Bloomquist said. “I’m really concerned that we don’t have any continuous motion offensively, and we’ve always had to rely on the three-man game, the two-man game between Taylor and Skip (Torres), or the three-man game between Taylor and Skip and Canales. And so we’ve got to get more people involved.”
Bloomquist said pressure defense and rebounding have also been focuses over the holidays. The Spartans have been outrebounded by almost two boards a game — which may not sound like a lot, but other than the 43-15 rebounding edge it had on overmatched Wichita Word of Life, EHS has been outrebounded dramatically.
Defensively, Bloomquist is hoping to have the Spartans do some more zone-pressing, which will increase their defensive repertoire beyond the “amoeba” and straight-zone defenses they’ve primarily been using.
“We need to press, because I need to get depth in the bench, and we need to score off our defense,” he said. “But we’re not good enough to play straight-up man to man full-court and score off the defense. I think we can (with) pressing, zone presses.”
The Spartans have responded well during practice over the break.
“I’ve really been pleased with their work ethic,” Bloomquist said. “When they come back from practice, the first day, they all have to run a mile under seven minutes... They have to, and they keep running until they make it. And this is the first year that I can remember since I’ve been doing it... that everybody made it. And that was encouraging.”
Coming off a 2-19 season in ’07-08, the Topeka West boys are 2-2 on the year with a 73-57 loss to Highland Park in its Centennial League opener. Six-foot-6 junior forward Alex North, who averaged 15 points and seven rebounds a season ago, is the Chargers’ best player. Guards Carlos Lopez and Jarrod Kruger have both shown some outside shooting ability; Kruger knocked down five treys against Highland Park.
Emporia High girls (4-1, 2-0) at Topeka West (1-3, 0-1)
Coach Bill Nienstedt’s main focus for the Lady Spartans over the break has been working on their run-and-jump defense, a type of full-court pressure that involves, among other things, funneling the opposing team’s dribbler toward the sideline as the ball is brought up the floor. The main idea is to force turnovers and get teams to play at the fast pace that the Spartans want.
“We’ve... gotta have something that we can use when we have to force tempo, when we have to have a turnover (in) late-game situations,” Nienstedt said. “We actually ran quite a little bit of it against Topeka High the last game, but what we found out was that we weren’t very good at it. So we used the Topeka High game, a lot of it after the first quarter I would say, to work on it during the game and find out what we could do and what we couldn’t do, so that we knew kind of what we needed to teach and what we needed to do a better job of...”
Nienstedt said the Spartans have gotten a little better at it each day.
“I think we understand the rotations out of it better all the time,” he said. “We have to be better on the ball in it, and we’ll find out (against Topeka West), I guess.”
The West girls are 1-3 and 0-1 in the Centennial League. The Chargers have beaten Kansas City-Washington and lost to Atchison, Highland Park and, in their last outing, Ottawa, which blasted West 75-24. Senior guard Ali McMahon leads West in scoring at 12.8 points per game.
Offensively, Emporia has been using the time away from game action to work on a single-post, four-guard offense that it used two years ago. The high-post-oriented attack allows the Spartans to go smaller if need be.
“There were several reasons we put it in,” Nienstedt said. “One, we wanted our JV to know it, and another thing: it makes us a little more flexible offensively. When we have to play small, we can go with four guards and one post.”
Forward Lindy Arndt, coming off a 17-point effort against Topeka High, is Emporia’s leading scorer at 9.8 points per game. Point guard Alli Armitage is just behind at 9.6 following an 11-point showing against Topeka High, and center Lexi Hileman is averaging 8.8.
SFIns (anonymous) says...
They will never be able to replace Taylor. He is the base of the entire team.
January 7, 2009 at 7:56 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )