Sports

Bass’s first collegiate touchdown sets the pace

By Matthew Semisch

08/26/2014

It’s a fact of life in junior college football that every two-year school’s team experiences a lot of turnover every season.

To clarify: That’s turnover as in older players leaving and newer ones coming in, not turnover as in giving up possession of the football.

The football team at Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) is no exception to this, and neither are the six other Lumberjack and Ladyjack sports teams on the school’s campus.

There’s never a whole lot of continuity on a junior college team’s roster from one season to the next. Some players exhaust their two years’ worth of eligibility before they know it, and, for one reason or another, many don’t even stick around that long.

This leaves these teams’ coaches with the tough task of having to overhaul their rosters on a fairly regular basis. Take the DCB football team, for instance: Nearly 150 players arrived on campus ahead of the Jacks’ fall camp, and that’s quite a large number for coaches to have to sieve through and find who will end up where on the team’s depth chart.

Some of those names, all of them attached to players hoping to become fan favorites and attract four-year schools, are taking over for players who have since moved on.

JR Bass, a freshman running back for DCB, is one such prospect.
A year ago, Jamarr Patterson was the Jacks’ workhorse tailback behind then-DCB quarterback Shazzon Mumphrey.

Over 11 games played, Patterson rushed for 613 yards on 130 carries and scored six touchdowns.

Both he and Mumphrey, however, are now both gone.
A solid No. 1 quarterback has not yet been named. Freshmen DeAngelo Orum and Krae Kelso both took snaps on Saturday during DCB’s 22-9 win over Minnesota West (MW).

At least at running back, however, Jacks head coach Tim Pfeifer and his staff seem to already have an answer.

DCB’s offense struggled to capitalize on a lot of the opportunities the Jacks’ defense created on Saturday. However, one of the offense’s leading lights was Bass.

The Live Oak, Fla., native looked relatively sharp in his first collegiate game, picking up 63 yards on 16 carries. To put that into perspective, Patterson averaged 55.7 yards per game in 2013.

What Bass will remember most from Saturday’s win over MW, though, is his first collegiate touchdown. Inside of seven minutes left in the game’s first quarter, Bass opened the scoring with a seven-yard carry into the end zone.

It wasn’t a gimme play by any means, however. After taking a handoff from Orum at the Bluejays’ 10 yard line, Bass gravitated toward the DCB sideline and, with MW defenders closing in on him, he quickly found himself running out of room with which to work.

Bass’s best course of action in trying to get into the end zone, he concluded, was dive to see how close he could get to breaking the plane.

“I actually didn’t think I was going to score,” Bass said. “I knew I was running out of room to work with and so I was just trying to get as close as I could.”

The acrobatic move worked out, leaving him with a story to tell of scoring in his first college football game.

“Making that play happen was awesome,”  Bass said. “Greatest feeling in the world.”