Weekend leftovers
Don’t think of these as leftovers from the weekend in South Dakota State hoops, but as bonus material:
The SDSU men have won six in a row over Fort Wayne by a total of 154 points. The last three meetings in Brookings have been decided by 35, 36 and 26 points.
One of the few areas for improvement from the weekend home sweep: Defensive rebounding. The Jacks gave up 16 offensive rips to Oakland and 13 to Fort Wayne, while collecting 6 and 12, respectively. That resulted in a 35-24 deficiency in second-chance points. But coach Scott Nagy wasn’t overly concerned about that because SDSU played better defensively - more misses result in more rebounds. The Jacks held Oakland to 38.5 percent from the floor and the Dons to 42.3 from the floor, bettering their defensive field-goal percentage for the season (44.6) on both nights.
SDSU men’s recruit Anders Broman made the Faces in the Crowd segment in Sports Illustrated for breaking the career scoring record in Minnesota high school ball. He also had his own day as proclaimed by the mayor of Duluth.
The 6-1 guard has scored between 20 and 61 points in every game this season.
Nagy was also pleased with subs Jake Bittle and Zach Horstman on Saturday. He said that the freshman Bittle might be the best on-ball defender on the team and that the sophomore Horstman has avoided becoming frustrated by inconsistent minutes.
Jacks junior Chad White has scored in double figures four games in a row since putting up a doughnut in a loss at North Dakota State.
SDSU sophomore wing Megan Waytashek has three double-doubles in the last 11 games and two new career highs for scoring - 23 and then 30. She and senior Ashley Eide are the only players to lead the team in scoring since Nov. 23. They’re separated by just six points for the season.
The Jacks largest lead in Fort Wayne: 2. And they trailed by as many as 10, and were down nine with 3:30 to go. But they didn’t allow a field goal in the final 5:12 and finished with a 15-0 edge in bench scoring.
The SDSU women landed another verbal last week in Champlin Park junior point guard Alexis Alexander. A three-star recruit according to ESPN.com, the 5-7 Alexander has spent the last five years in the North Tartan program, a renowned summer club that has send numerous players to Brookings.
North Tartan director Bill Larson said that Alexander - already a two-time all-conference pick - has a knack for dictating the offense whether by distributing or shooting. She was getting high-major interest (Kansas and Washington, specifically), but only mid-major offers so far (UND, Oakland, Kent State) and decided to go with SDSU.
“She wanted to go somewhere where they win,” Larson explained, “and she feels that with her skill level she’ll be able to keep that going and kind of improve it, to fishing off some Sweet 16s and so forth. She see that they’re on the verge.”
Terry Vandrovec also posts regular updates on his Twitter page.
