If the Mountain Range boys basketball team can keep playing as well as it did last Friday night against Northglenn, it’ll put itself in good position to win the Front Range League.
In its 69-37 win the Mustangs (11-3, 3-0) shot the ball well (44 percent) but, more importantly, the pressure they caused on defense forced the Norse into 32 turnovers.
In Northglenn coach Kevin Knudson’s opinion, the turnovers were the storyline in his team’s loss.
“Going into the fourth quarter we’re down by 16 and have turned the ball over 20 times. If we would have taken care of the ball we would have been tied,” Knudson said. “My guys are young and scared of the ball and we need to get tougher. If we can’t do that it’s going to be a long year.”
Applying such heavy pressure on Northglenn (2-12, 1-2) wasn’t something that was in the gameplan specifically for the Norse; it’s what Mountain Range has done well all season long.
“Our defense is what we focus on and is our priority in practice,” Mountain Range’s Mitch Castillo said. “We came out and executed our defense. We just didn’t take care of the ball on offense so that was our problem.”
When looking at the scorebook after the game, Mountain Range coach Jim Mason was pleased to see that eight of his 11 players were in the scoring column, led by Castillo’s 20 points. Nick Kuhl added 14 while Edgar Crockett was also in double-figures with 13 points.
“That’s good, we want to spread it out and not have one person as our primary scorer,” Mason said. “We want to get three, four, five guys scoring for us on a regular basis and everyone contributes in some way.”
Along with the turnover issues, Northglenn suffered a big loss when the team’s leading rebounder Jarvis Williams suffered what appeared to be an ankle injury midway through the second quarter. He played just a few minutes the rest of the way, and not having his presence in the middle hurt.
“We aren’t very deep and when one of our big guys goes down we don’t have much height to replace him,” Knudson said. “Rebounds didn’t kill us tonight, the turnovers did. When Jarvis is in the game we can run more sets on offense and we can do more things. It really hurts to have him out.”
With three weeks left in the regular season, the stakes are getting higher for Mountain Range.
The Mustangs will play their third of four straight road game Friday night at Monarch before coming home on Feb. 5 to host No. 4 ranked Fort Collins. A week later the Mustangs host Fairview, the other team to have not lost a conference game yet.
Of the four road games, three of them are against Front Range competition and all three are winnable games for Mountain Range. Mason knows how significant it would be to get those wins going into those two big games.
“It is important because they (Fort Collins) are dynamite and Fairview is extremely good,” Mason said about doing well on the road trip. “So we are going to have to build on what we are doing and keep playing hard.”