Stevenson steps it up, tops Lake Zurich

There was concern this weekend about a breakout of fever on the Stevenson boys basketball team.

As in, Saturday Night Fever.

The Patriots were a bit distracted before their North Suburban Conference game at Lake Zurich on Saturday night. Their school was putting on a big turn-about dance called Winterfest and many of the players had been asked by girls to attend.

Lake Zurich went as far as to move the game up two hours to a 5:30 p.m. tip so that the Stevenson players would have plenty of time to dance the night away.

It was a nice gesture, but it worried Stevenson coach Pat Ambrose.

Would his players be thinking too much about dancing and not enough about hooping?

“I told the kids, I’ve got you from 5:30 to about 7. After that, you can do all the dancing you want,” Ambrose said. “But until then, I don’t want to hear anything about the dance.”

By keeping their focus, the Patriots were able to switch from their basketball shoes to their dancing shoes with smiles on their faces.

Stevenson bounced Lake Zurich for a 48-42 victory to move to 11-10 overall and 4-7 in the NSC Lake Division.

Lake Zurich falls to 5-19 overall and 2-9 in the Lake.

“I’ve got to credit our kids for having good focus, they really did a good job,” Ambrose said. “We came out hard. We were real aggressive in the first half.”

Stevenson jumped out to a 9-1 early lead and was up 24-16 at halftime. From then on, the Patriots never relinquished the lead.

Troy Radtke hit two straight 3-pointers and Johnny Ricchio added another to lead Stevenson’s first-half surge.

“When Lake Zurich went zone, we were able to hit some big outside shots with Troy and Johnny,” Ambrose said. “We had a lot of other guys play well tonight, too. We were very balanced.”

Radtke led Stevenson with 12 points while Ricchio and Ryan Chapman had 8 points each and Michael Fleming and Kevin Earl added 7 and 6 points, respectively.

“We talked about how Lake Zurich has played a lot of close games this season and had recently beaten Mundelein, one of the best teams in the conference,” Ambrose said. “We wanted our guys to know that Lake Zurich is capable of beating good teams and that we needed to keep our focus on that and not somewhere else, like the dance.”

Lake Zurich cut its deficits, which were as big as 10 points, by changing up its lineup. Bears coach Billy Pitcher rotated in a lot of reserves to shake things up. And, while playing almost the entire second half, they came through.

At one point late in the game, Lake Zurich was down only 3 points, 44-41.

Reserve junior forward Doug Murphy was a beast in the paint for the Bears. He scored a team-high 10 points and pulled down 8 rebounds for his best game of the season. Meanwhile, reserve guards Brenden Seeger and Kyle Russ also hit some big shots from the perimeter to give the Bears a lift there.

“Those guys had all been playing well in practice lately and we wanted to give them more playing time,” Pitcher said. “They made the most of their opportunities.”

Russ and Jeff O’Brien each finished with 6 points for Lake Zurich.