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A year of football led another Lutheran North player, Jacob Burke, to the basketball court.
“It helped a lot with my aggressiveness inside, like not being afraid to go after anybody,” said Burke, who scored 14 points and gave the Mustangs a strong presence as they opened the basketball season Tuesday with 48 -28 non-league victories against Ford.
“I can be as physical as anyone out there. I want to keep my court presence as high as possible.”
Burke played tight end on Lutheran North’s football team and had a breakout year with over 500 receiving yards and six touchdowns.
“I think the difference with Jacob is he played football for the first time this year,” North coach Jeff DeMasse said. “He’s in really good shape. He is the Jacob we saw at the end of last season.
“He played well tonight. He is very fast. He creates a matchup problem because he’s actually a ‘three’ but he plays a ‘four.’ When a big man is on him, he can drive — just like you saw today.”
When Burke drives, he usually throws up at the free throw line. He was productive there, making 10 of his 14 foul shots.
“During the summer if I’m not at football camp, I’m in the gym working on my free throws,” Burke said. “I feel like this is my most important year and I know that as one of the bigs on the team, I’m going to get a lot of time inside. I know that if I practice my free throws and I can get out-physical in guys, I can have a good season.”
If Burke can provide an inside threat on offense, it will take some pressure off last year’s leading Mustang scorer, Ben Narr.
“Ben’s a great shooter, so if teams focus on him, it opens up the inside for everybody,” Burke said.
Narr finished with 15 points and had seven of them in a 9-2 run that started late in the third quarter and put the Mustangs ahead 43-21 a minute into the fourth quarter.
DeMasse was pleased with North’s overall performance, but he was most pleased with the defensive effort.
“I expect us to play well on defense, but I didn’t expect us to play that well,” he said. “We talked and we were athletic. I don’t care who you play, to hold a team to 20-some points — especially a Jeremy (Denha)-coached team — I’ll take that all day. I’m excited.”
Burke said the Mustangs spend a lot of practice time on defense.
“Our main focus in practice is defense,” he said. “We spend about an hour a day on defense. We know they have a good shooter in their point guard (Dakarai Rogers) and the plan is to shut him down as much as possible and lock our big men inside. Having our hands on the perimeter was our main focus throughout the game.”
Rogers, who led Ford with 12 points, is the only returning Falcon with a lot of game experience.
“We wanted to set the tone tonight with our effort and I thought our kids played really well,” Denha said. “We have one returning player and we’re playing six sophomores. Others are transfer boys and this is their first varsity experience. I thought we fought and competed. Only those two middle quarters got us.”
Ford led 9-6 after one quarter after Rogers’ 3-point basket in the final minute, but the Mustangs outscored the Falcons 14-3 in the second quarter and 18-9 in the third.
“They do a great job in their zone,” Denha said of North. “They played that 2-3 zone and we struggled to see beyond that. I liked some of the things we started doing in the second half, but we didn’t finish the shots. We did some things against their man (defense) in the first quarter but we got really stagnant in the second quarter. We’ve got some guys that are going to fight and compete and hopefully in February we’ll know who we are.”
The game featured a Jim Barker alumni reunion. Both coaches played for the Hall of Fame coach at Ford and Barker was at the game to watch his former players match wits on the sidelines.
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Ford 9 3 9 7—28
Lutheran North 6 14 18 10—48
Ford (0-1): Dakarai Rogers 12, Aaron Johnson 2, Diego Harden 2, Eli Miller 2, Gavin Guglielmetti 5, Dominic Cavacini 1, Lorenzo Childs 2, William Tauber 2. Totals: 9 (2) 8-20— 28 .
Lutheran North (1-0): Brayden Monroe 3, Ben Narr 15, Gio Lutfy 9, Jacob Burke 14, Bennie Carroll 5, Ben Petersdorf 2. Totals: 15 (4) 14-24—48.
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