Omaha Skutt bounced back from its first in-state loss of the season to score a conference road win on Friday night, taking down Omaha Roncalli 71-63 in the Lion’s Den.
Story of the Game
Neither team shot the ball particularly well, which is why Skutt dominating the offensive glass is what ultimately decided the game. The SkyHawks more than doubled up the Crimson Pride in total rebounds including 21-6 on the offensive end. I had three different SkyHawks with double-digit rebounds and three others with four or more.
Skutt only hit three 3-pointers all game and had more than twice as many turnovers, but the rebounding edge was enough to offset those issues as Roncalli only shot 5-for-27 from 3. The SkyHawks start 6-foot-8 junior Brock Scholl next to 6-foot-8 sophomore George Ziebell, and the Crimson Pride (who start 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-4 in the frontcourt) had a tough time keeping them off the glass all game long.
“I think it can be like what it was tonight,” Skutt coach Kyle Jurgens said. “Some of the defensive boards are because they didn’t shoot it great. We’ve got to hope that a little bit of that is our game-planning and our defense … On the offensive glass, hopefully that’s our effort and toughness and stuff like that. This team’s young and inexperienced, but if we can get that kind of offensive rebounding and chase out of those guys, we’ll continue to progress in the way that we’re hoping.”
Roncalli took the lead midway through the first before the SkyHawks closed the period on an 11-2 run, and Skutt maintained the advantage the rest of the way. The SkyHawks led by 11 at halftime then used another 11-2 run in the third to extend the lead to 16.
Roncalli dug in and managed to fight back into the game in the fourth, pulling within six with three minutes to play. However, a missed free throw, a layup rimming out and a missed box out put a halt to the comeback and allowed the SkyHawks to hold on for the win, improving to 9-2 and bouncing back from a 58-52 loss to top-ranked Crete in the Doane Holiday Tournament last weekend.
Coach Speak
“After our last game, this is a tough one,” Jurgens said. “Coming here, they have a good group, a lot of experience. Any time we play here it’s going to be a battle. It’s kind of what we expected and I told them at halftime, there’s going to be a run, a surge, a whatever in the second half that we were going to have to withstand and even with a little bit of foul trouble I think we did a nice job. Ultimately we just did a really nice job on the glass. We chased rebounds really well — Brock, George, Dylan [Van Dyke], even Eddie [Linderman], they were all pretty active. I think that and pushing the ball a little bit and getting some buckets in transition was the difference.”
Standout Performers
The player of the game was Scholl, who dropped a monster double-double with 28 points on 13-of-19 shooting (1-of-2 from 3), 11 rebounds (five offensive) and three blocks. Scholl received his first Division I offer in early December from the home-town Mavericks.
“He’s been huge and he’s been kind of an every-night guy,” Jurgens said. “The scoring’s been one thing, but he’s been rebounding well too, but I think tonight he kind of took it to another level. We talked, he’s averaging single-digit rebounds and we said he should probably be a double-digit rebounder. And so we kind of challenged him to step that part of his game up and he ended up with 20-seomting and 11 tonight, but the 11 is the thing. He’s got to still have the 11 and a lot of the 28 or whatever he had come from the 11 and chasing rebounds, and he made shots.”
Junior guard Kyle Cannon added 15 points, four rebounds, four assists and two steals while senior guard Will O’Doherty chipped in 10 points and four rebounds. Jurgens also spoke highly of the way sophomore guard Carter Wissink handled an expanded role in a difficult environment. Junior Henry Houlihan, the team’s sixth man, suffered a season-ending knee injury last week. Wissink contributed six points, three boards, two assists and no turnovers in his absence.
For the Crimson Pride, senior Christian Swift led the way with 24 points, shooting 10-of-14 from the field (1-of-3 from 3) and 3-of-3 from the line with five rebounds, five assists and two steals. He routinely got into the paint and showed off great touch with runners and crafty finishes, and the 6-foot-1 guard even threw down a dunk in the third quarter.
Senior Brady McGill got going a bit in the second half to finish with 10 points, six rebounds and three steals as the Crimson Pride fell to 6-4.
