Tigers Dominate Boards, RaidersThe Warsaw Tigers rebounded from a pair of recent losses in a big way Friday night. They did so, in large part, by doing just that – rebounding. In a 68-46 win over Northern Lakes Conference foe Northridge, the Tigers crashed the boards from start to finish and held a dominant 34-19 advantage. Warsaw grabbed 15 offensive rebounds in the 22-point win and scored 21 second-chance points against the Raiders. Standout guard Kyle Mangas did his thing, as the Indiana All-Star hopeful tallied 22 points, seven rebounds and three assists. It was the play in the post of fellow seniors Jeremy David, Braxton Minix and Jaceb Burish, however, that really got the attention of both Warsaw coach Doug Ogle and Northridge skipper Ronnie Thomas. David scored a career high 14 points and grabbed nine rebounds, while Minix scored a season high 12 points to go along with six boards, and Burish finished with eight points. “That’s the strength of our team – rebounding, especially offensive rebounding,” said Ogle, whose team improved to 7-4 overall and 2-0 in the NLC with its 16th consecutive conference win. “Jeremy David was real close to a double-double, which in a high school game is hard to do. I asked him, ‘who do you think you are, (Purdue University player) Biggie Swanigan?’ That’s about as aggressive as we’ve seen him, not only to get rebounds but to actually shoot the ball and finish plays. I’m hoping we can build off this and this can be a confidence builder for Jeremy David. “Through 10 games, the combination of David, Minix and Burish was averaging four free throw attempts per game. That tells us we’re not getting the ball inside enough, and when we get it inside they’re not being aggressive enough. The rebounding helps with that, but just in general, we did a better job tonight of seeing into the basket area and throwing it inside. A lot of good came out of it. That’s what we’ve been missing. We’ve had very little inside offense, outside of Kyle.” Thomas, whose team fell to 3-5 overall and 1-1 in league play, admitted his gameplan was focused on Mangas, and that he hadn’t seen that kind of play out of Warsaw’s three senior frontliners. “We focused a lot on No. 2 (Mangas), which a lot of teams do,” said Thomas. “I think we waited a little too much, we reacted. We reacted too slowly and some of our rotations were too late. Guys didn’t communicate very well. “I think you saw Minix and David hurt us on the backside with rebounds. We didn’t initiate a lot, and that was a problem. The end of the second quarter and into the third, I don’t know what happened there for about 10 minutes.” The Tigers led 11-9 after one quarter of play, 29-20 at halftime and 48-32 at the end of the third. Northridge led 17-16 midway through the second stanza, prompting Ogle to call a timeout. Luke Morrison had scored 12 of the Raiders’ 17 points, and Ogle wanted to address his team’s attention to the 6-foot-3 senior. The Tigers responded to the timeout and their coach’s message by going on an 11-0 run. “I felt like our focus on him was not good enough, defensively,” Ogle said of calling the timeout. “He was starting to really get in a rhythm. Mainly it was to address the fact that he had, at the time, almost all of their points. Our whole thing going into the game was guarding him. We were concerned with Conner Utley and Nick Yoder, but I was disappointed with our team attention, lack of attention, to Morrison. We were being too soft defensively.” Morrison finished with a game-high 25 points, while Utley scored eight points and Camden Knepp and Yoder chipped in with four each. The Raiders were 15 of 44 from the field overall, 4 of 19 from three-point range, and made 12 of 17 free throw attempts. Warsaw was 28 of 50, 3 of 11 from the arc, and made 9 of 12 charity tosses. The Tigers are in action again Friday when they travel to Goshen for an NLC game, followed by a trip the next night to Fort Wayne Snider. Northridge hosts East Noble Tuesday. A subplot to Friday’s game in the Tiger Den was the absence of Warsaw junior Ross Johnson. Johnson, normally in the Tigers’ starting lineup, decided to leave the team and is reportedly enrolled at Triton High School. “Ross has decided not to be on our team anymore,” said Ogle. “He told me that on Wednesday before practice. It was surprising to me. What he told me was that basketball wasn’t fun for him anymore, and that he was tired of playing and just couldn’t do it anymore. I accepted that, and we moved on.”
