David Bergstrom looks to drive to the basket against Esko last Monday night. Despite playing Esko tough for the first half, the boys ended up losing 59-43. For the game Bergstrom had 8 points and pulled down 6 rebounds.
The Cook County High School (CCHS) boys’ basketball team faced a tough Esko Eskimo team last Monday, Dec. 13 at home, and it was a tale of two contrasting halves.
After starting the season 2-0, the boys knew Esko would be their toughest competition to date. And they were.
Neither team has much height. Esko’s tallest player was 6’2”, while the Vikings’ Ryan Martinson stands a shade over 6’3”. In fact, the Vikings matched up physically with the Eskomos. So it was going to be a good game. And it was, at least for a while.
With three-quarters of the first half over and six lead changes, the score was tied at 18. CCHS fans had reason to cheer and plenty of reasons to be hopeful. But at that juncture, the Eskomos slowly crept to a six-point half-time advantage, taking a 31-25 lead into the locker room.
But the Vikings had played well, and because most of their points had been scored from in close and they had rebounded well, they had reason to look forward to the second half.
Esko’s Jake Stainbrook applied a lot of pressure to the Vikings’ sophomore point guard Kale Boomer. Boomer played a good game, scoring 8 points, and handled the ball well in the face of Esko’s very tough pressure defense.
In fact, over the course of the first period of play the Vikings made 47.8 percent of their field goal tries from inside the three-point line. From three point range they were 2-5, averaging 40 percent.
Meanwhile, Esko was held to 40.6 percent first half shooting and were 3-11 from threepoint land.
However, Esko started the second half with a tenacious man-to-man defense and the game quickly went in their favor. While the Vikings struggled to find an open man, Esko players repeatedly stole the ball and ended up outscoring the Vikings 28-18 the second half.
For the game, Esko scored 27 points off of turnovers while the Vikings failed to score any points off of their defense.
Neither team shot well from three-point range, averaging 25 percent from beyond the arc. Each team hit three 3-pointers.
Rebounds were fairly even. The Vikings tallied 28 for the game while Esko players pulled down 32. Dylan Quaife snatched 7 rebounds to lead the Vikes in that category.
“Dylan played a great allaround game,” said Head Coach Mitch Dorr. “He was strong from start to finish.”
For the game senior guard Ryan Martinson grabbed fiverebounds and scored 3 points. Quaife ended up leading the Vikings in scoring with 16 points, while Kale Boomer, David Bergstrom and Colin Everson netted 8 points each. Bergstrom also pulled down six rebounds.
In describing his kids play, Dorr said, “We just had a five minute lull in the second half where fatigue crept in and we lost focus.”
Next up for the Vikings is Cromwell on Friday, Dec. 17 at home. The game starts at 4:45. Come out and cheer our Vikings!
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