Usually it’s the visiting team that seeks to take the crowd out of the game, but a dominant first half by the Fort Lewis men’s basketball team took care of that Friday night.
After playing seven of eight games on the road, the Skyhawks came back home and used an 18-0 run in the game’s opening minutes to take the air out of the Black Hills State team, and the edge off the packed student section full of fans at Whalen Gymnasium.
When it was all over, few remained to see the buzzer sound on another FLC win, a 66-48 victory against the unfortunate Yellow Jackets.
Daniel Hernandez led all scorers with 16 points and led an FLC bench to a 36-7 advantage against the opposing reserves.
“For us, we just needed to get back to the Whalen,” Fort Lewis head coach Bob Pietrack said. “Sometimes when you’re on the road, you lose a game and don’t have time to fully recover. You just put a Band-Aid on it. We got some good practice time in this week and it made a difference.”
The Skyhawks fell behind 5-3 early but responded with a haymaker that staggered the Yellow Jackets.
Fort Lewis (14-3, 9-2 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference) responded with a first-half run that forced Black Hills State (5-12, 2-9 RMAC) into playing catchup for the rest of the evening.
The Skyhawks’ defense forced 11 turnovers in the first 20 minutes and converted them into 17 points at the other end to build an 18-point halftime lead. The offense shot 58-percent, and the FLC bench was dominant in the first half in outscoring the visitors 16-0.
The second half was more of the same from the stingy Skyhawks and their superior reserves. Though the Yellow Jackets improved on the 31-percent shooting from the first half, they never got within 14 points.
With Hernandez and the Skyhawks bench doing damage, and with the lead well in hand, Pietrack was able to rest his guys more than usual, which is always a luxury for an RMAC team on a Friday with another game looming each Saturday.
“The past couple games I’ve been playing well, so that’s kept the confidence up,” Hernandez said.
“We need to be aggressive, and, when we take it to the basket hard and drive in the middle, good things happen.”
Joshua Blaylock had 12 points, and Will Morse added 10 in the win. Riley Farris added nine points off the bench for FLC, and Alex Semadeni had eight points and a team-high eight rebounds in a reserve role.
Fraser Malcolm led Black Hills State with 12 points.
“We just hadn’t had a lot of time to practice with the travel and finals week,” Pietrack said. “We didn’t have that week to just focus and get better without any distractions. We did that this week, and you saw the difference. Now, we need to carry it into a tough game (Saturday).”
Fort Lewis will look for the weekend sweep at 7 p.m. Saturday against South Dakota Mines.
jfries@durangoherald.com
