Without star junior forward Riley Farris and junior point guard Logan Hokanson, a young but highly talented Fort Lewis College men’s basketball team sent a resounding statement.
“The ’Hawks are back,” FLC fifth-year head coach Bob Pietrack declared with an emphatic slap of the score table, as his Skyhawks, with two true freshman and a redshirt sophomore on the floor, closed out a huge 90-85 win Sunday night against Eastern New Mexico at home inside Whalen Gymnasium in Durango. FLC closed out the opening weekend of the conference challenge with a pair of wins against regional foes from the Lone Star Conference after a 91-78 win Saturday against Western New Mexico.
FLC is off to its first 2-0 start since the 2015-16 season when the Skyhawks went 28-4 and won the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference regular season and tournament championships before a South Central Regional tournament win against Dallas Baptist and a second-round appearance in the NCAA Division II tournament.
The start also comes on the heels of last year’s 12-16 overall record and 7-15 showing in the RMAC in which the Skyhawks missed out on the conference tournament and were forced to rebuild the roster in hopes of restoring order and a return to the top of the RMAC.
“It feels good. Most coaches use coach speak, I’m not going to. It feels really good, and here’s why,” Pietrack said. “We got used to winning here. We got dealt a really short deck of cards last year with some adversity that no program can really fight through with the injuries and some people leaving our program. We had to sit on it for six months. We’ve retooled our roster and put the work in, and these young men deserve success. This is just the beginning of what could be a special season for us.”
It was a special game Sunday for the Skyhawks in what felt like a late-season important conference game. In a second half in which each team took turns throwing haymakers, FLC was the team still standing despite losing Farris with 7 minutes, 30 seconds to play in the second half after he picked up an offensive foul for his fourth of the game along with a technical foul for waving off the referee with a dismissive motion after the call. Farris finished with a game-high 21 points in only 17:03 of time on the floor. He finished the weekend with 47 points in 43 minutes on the floor.
But without Farris in the closing minutes, it put the weight on sophomore forward Brenden Boatwright, who hit crucial shots down the stretch and finished with 14 points on 5-of-7 shooting from the field and 4-of-6 from the foul line. He also grabbed five rebounds.
“You gotta play confident,” Boatwright said. “I’ve been in that particular scenario once before at Chadron (State) last year. I just tried to dive into some of my experience there, play within myself and try to make plays for my team.”
Hokanson, the team’s starting point guard, also missed the majority of the second half after a wrist injury was aggravated in the first half.
With point guard Cesar Molina dealing with foul trouble a night after he was a hero with 13 points in the win against Western New Mexico, it was true freshmen Akuel Kot and Junior Garbrah who stepped up.
Kot finished with 15 points, five rebounds and three assists and played 37:34 of a possible 40 minutes. Pietrack drew up plays for him in the game’s final minutes, and he delivered a crucial four points in the game’s final minute.
“When you got people who trust you, it’s just great,” said the freshman from Texas who had 29 points in his first two collegiate games. “It’s a lot of fun. First two college games, I’m still adjusting to it, trying to get better every single day. It’s a lot of fun. I’m enjoying every single second.”
The other freshman was Junior Garbrah, who made an 80-foot shot at the halftime buzzer to give FLC a 45-35 lead at the break.
MBB: Fort Lewis freshman Junior Garbrah puts an exclamation point on the first half!! Skyhawks lead 45-35 over Eastern New Mexico at the break #TalonsUp #LetsSoar #RMACmbb pic.twitter.com/pmJEZen9pd
— Fort Lewis Skyhawks (@FLCSkyhawks) November 11, 2019
“Once I let it go, as it was about mid-flight, I raised my hand, put the three points up because I thought it was gonna go in,” the freshman from Australia said.
Garbrah, who spent two years playing high school in Arizona at Bella Vista Prep, which won the national championship last season, finished with seven points and four assists, including a beautiful lob pass to Will Wittman for a dunk that had the nearly 500 fans inside Whalen as loud as it is with more than a thousand fans during a Friday night during conference season.
But for all the importance placed on the underclassmen, it was FLC’s lone senior who stood strong. Danny Garrick, a Division I transfer from Nicholls State, made several big 3s in crucial moments and finished with 17 points and four rebounds. He played 34 minutes despite suffering a sprained ankle in the first half that required him to check out and get taped up.
“A game like that, you don’t miss it,” Garrick said. “It’s kind of like a Super Bowl. I don’t know why.
“When I hurt (the ankle), it hurt bad. I probably shouldn’t have played on it, but you don’t miss these type of games. When Farris went down, you just gotta be better, and that’s what I tried to do.”
FLC held a slim lead the majority of the second half. It happened despite 20 points off the bench from Jose Serrano of Eastern New Mexico and a red-hot shooting performance in the second half from the Greyhounds. They made 6-of-10 3s in the second half and shot 56.3% overall in the half.
Marvin Mapaga and Isaiah Murphy each finished with 11 points, and Devin Pullum had eight points with a couple of timely buckets.
FLC also got 11 points and a team-high six rebounds from Wittman, who also was special in big spots.
Pietrack credited associate head coach Daniel Steffensen for coming up with the right plan defensively for FLC to win the game.
The Skyhawks will have a strong chance to go 6-0 with four games against NAIA opponents before the conference opener Dec. 6 at home against New Mexico Highlands (2-0). FLC will play its next six games at home.
With a roster full of quality players who get along on the floor and epitomize the word “team,” FLC is excited about its chances.
“We have a fun team,” Pietrack said. “If you were at the games this weekend, you would say, yeah, we have a very fun team to watch. It’s the essence of a team. It’s the whole group.”
jlivingston@durangoherald.com
