North Tonawanda boys’ basketball coach Ryan Mountain said the new season will be built around the simple, but fitting, motto of ‘strength in numbers’.
When you have as much depth as the Lumberjacks do then numbers is something that is definitely on your side.
“No one is going to count the minutes,” Mountain said during a recent practice. “We’re going to make the minutes count.”
The Jacks enter the 2016-17 season, their seventh under Mountain, as a determined group ready to play for eachother and ready to wash the taste of last season out of their mouths.
Two seasons ago, with a senior heavy team, the Jacks won 17 games, claimed the Niagara Frontier League title and made it all the way to Buffalo State College before eventually falling in the Section VI Class A-1 championship game. Mountain was also quick to add that along with being a very good team they also had the good fortune of not having to deal with any major injury or illness that depleted their ranks.
Last season a younger Jacks team, playing a comparably more difficult schedule, finished 8-12 overall. NT ended up earning a bye in the first round, but an off-court violation of team rules resulted in seven players being unable to finish the season. So the Jacks went into their Class A-1 quarterfinal game at South Park with just four varsity players and three JV call-ups and saw the season come to a close.
“Mainly just because we don’t want anything like that to ever happen again,” said Jacks co-captain and leading scorer, Trevor Book. “It’s unfinished business. We just want to go as far as we can this year.”
Senior and second leading scorer Alex Quinn (8PPG) will join Book in the role being captain.
“When your best players are your hardest workers you know you are going to have a good team. No one works harder than Trevor and Alex,” Mountain said.
“In this off season Trevor has taken his game to the next level, but he has also focused on becoming a complete player and he’s really matured. Last year he had such a great season scoring, averaging 15 points a game, mainly as our sixth man.
Alex is a third year varsity player. Along with Brandon Casterline, they were fortunate enough to be important reserves on that (2015) championship team and learn from the great senior leadership they had ahead of them.”
Quinn agreed with Book saying that the lows of last season, some of which was within their control, has made them a more mature, harder working group that not only wants to win, but atone for things that went wrong last year.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Quinn said, as he referred to Book’s unfinished business statement.
“We had a chance to go Buff State, compete and go to the championship for all we know and it kind of got ruined. So it’s like we’re coming in with a chip on our shoulders, even though we didn’t help ourselves. We want to kind of make it better.”
The Jacks will have height at center with 6-foot-5 senior Rory Farkas who, like Book, experienced a break out season last year to become one of the Jacks most dependable players as he scored 7 PPG.
Point guard Vinny Tripi returns to run the NT offense.
“Vinny has been excellent at controlling our teams tempo and making sure the ball continues to move,” Mountain said.
Casterline, who assumed a greater role of leadership this past fall as a captain on the volleyball team, will join fellow senior forwards Patrick Milbrand, Kyle McNeill and Zack Woodard as the heart of the NT defense. Woodard led the team in deflections (2.5) and steals (2.5) per game.
Joe Kish, Sean Ferry and Jordan Fox will give the Jacks depth at guard. While senior Alex Johnson and lone newcomer Codie Cronk will add some power and physical play in the paint.
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