Sports
Jacks fall under Mystics’ spell
Matthew Semisch
01/13/2015
Mon-Dak Conference sports teams are thrown together in a peculiar arrangement. They’re all in the same league in one way but, in a grander sense, they’re not.
Not all of the seven schools in the Mon-Dak are in the same National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) classification. Most are NJCAA Division I, while Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) and United Tribes field Disivision II programs.
Bismarck State, the DCB men’s basketball team’s opponent last Thursday at the Woodshed, is a Division I outfit. DCB head coach Brandon Colvin feels, though, that his Lumberjacks and the Mystics should be considered equals.
The problem there is that they didn’t look it often enough on Thursday.
DCB, ranked 19th in the most recent Division II poll, did show occasional signs of being able to hang with the Mystics. The Jacks couldn’t keep it up over 40 minutes, though, and BSC coasted to an 87-70 victory in both teams’ first Mon-Dak league outing this season.
Speaking after the game, Colvin took responsibility for the loss. Part of it came down to hard work, he said, and another was attributable to him.
“They outplayed us, plain and simple,” Colvin reasoned. “There were stretches where we looked really good and then we kind of got outplayed and Bismarck out-hustled us to some loose balls, and I didn’t make the proper adjustments that I needed to soon enough.
“I hand it to Bismarck, because they were ready to go for 40 minutes and we weren’t, and that falls to me. In the end, it’s my job to get those guys ready, and I failed in that tonight.”
What did the Jacks in more than anything else on Thursday, however, was the beginning of the second half. The teams had gone into halftime deadlocked at 41-41, but a 14-2 BSC run to open the second frame blew a tight game wide open.
DCB (14-4) did work to cut the deficit back down during the second half. With 2:02 remaining, the Jacks were still in with a chance down 80-70, but a 7-0 BSC run then put the result on ice.
Starting second halves slowly has occasionally been a problem for the Jacks. No team DCB met in nonconference play, however, was able to take advantage of that in the way the Mystics did on Thursday.
“We’ve had that happen numerous times this year, but Bismarck is the first team we’ve played that has been good enough to just make that stick,” Colvin said.
“We worked to get back into the game, but Bismarck took our counter-punch and kept going.”
“We had a chance to cut their lead in the second half to eight, six, but they didn’t crack,” Colvin continued. “They took what we gave them and kept going.”
Another problem the Jacks proved themselves unable to solve was BSC forward Trevor Zacher. The sophomore from Beulah was an irrestistible force on Thursday, ending the game with 30 points, nine rebounds and two steals.
Jacks guard Gilbert Carter led his own team with 22 points and seven rebounds. He also posted four assists and as many steals against BSC.
The two teams will meet again on Feb. 2 in Bismarck. Colvin hopes that game will be more indicative of what he feels is an equal level of talent on both sides.
“They’re a Division I team by name and level only, but I don’t really see it as them being better than us just because they’re Division I,” Colvin said. “In the end, I think we match up fairly well with them when we play like we can, but tonight we didn’t.
“I think this is a very winnable game for us if we play. We had a couple of chances to take a lead in the first half but didn’t and that hurt us, and it’s just little mistakes that add up, and then in the second half it’s pretty evident that we fell apart.”
On Monday after press time, DCB faced United Tribes, the only other Division II team in the Mon-Dak. With no conference postseason title to play for ahead of the NJCAA Region XIII tournament, beating United Tribes on Monday in Bismarck would be the ideal pick-me-up.
“We’ve got Tribes on Monday now, and that’s huge for us because they’re Division II and after the same thing we’re after,” Colvin said.
DCB will host Williston State on Thursday (8 p.m) before visiting Dawson next Monday.