St. Charles North overtakes Geneva in 4th quarter
Since both Geneva and St. Charles North had suffered tough conference boys basketball losses less than 24 hours earlier, one thing was a certainty when the two teams met Saturday night in Geneva.
One team was going to score a bounce-back victory.
After leading for the better part of 3 quarters, it appeared that team was going to be Geneva.
That is, until the fourth quarter.
St. Charles North (10-8) took the lead for good at 41-40 on an acrobatic jumper by Josh Mikes in the first minute of the final period and built a 52-44 advantage midway through the quarter after Beau Blakeley's steal and layup.
After Geneva (12-6) pulled to within 52-48 on Dan Hince's 3-pointer with 3:22 remaining, the North Stars scored the game's final 8 points to emerge with a 60-48 nonconference triumph.
The quality road win helped take some of the sting out of the North Stars' 66-55 loss to East Aurora Friday night.
"This is a tough place to play and they're well-coached, so to compete with East Aurora and keep it a ballgame, then come in and win at Geneva - it's a quality weekend," said North Stars coach Tom Poulin.
Poulin made a shrewd coaching decision of his own after his team fell behind 38-31 midway through the third quarter.
"I thought we could pressure them," said the coach. "I just thought that we needed to do something different besides half-court man (defense). We wanted to extend the defense out and see if their guards could stay composed.
"Lucky for us, for a small stretch they handed the ball to us a couple times."
Geneva committed 7 fourth-quarter turnovers while being outscored 21-8 in the final stanza.
"The wheels fell off the cart in the fourth quarter," admitted Vikings coach Phil Ralston, whose team suffered a 67-66 loss to Rochelle Friday night.
"For whatever the rationale, we just did not run our offense very well in the second half.
"Defensively, some of the things that we were doing well we stopped doing. We didn't close out on shooters and we didn't do a good enough job of blocking out, but I think turnovers and not running our offense was the biggest issue."
After being held scoreless in the first half, North Stars senior guard Beau Blakeley (12 points) and Mikes combined for 23 second-half points.
"If you take a look at the games where we've played well, those are the games where Beau is active," said Poulin. "Those are the games where maybe Beau is doing things that don't show up in the score sheet. They lead to us playing better basketball as a team."
Mikes sat out the majority of the second quarter after getting into foul trouble.
"Josh (Mikes) made a difference in the second half," added Poulin. "My rule has been if you can stay in the ballgame when one of your starters has two fouls, you keep him on the bench until halftime."
Senior guard David Johnson, who scored a game-high 20 points, helped Poulin stick to his plan as he nearly single-handedly kept his team in the game with 15 first-half points. St. Charles North trailed 30-24 at halftime.
"I felt like I had to do something because Josh (Mikes) was out and nothing else was really working," said Johnson, who connected on three 3-pointers. "But all of our guys started getting hot in the fourth quarter."
Chris Conrad added 9 points for the North Stars, who face Lockport Monday in Joliet.
Nolan Block and Scott Wendt paced Geneva with 12 and 11 points, respectively.
"I'm just disappointed that we let another team outscore us by 18 points (36-18) in the second half," said Ralston. "We're at that point in the season where we've got to start getting better or we're going the other direction."