Smith seeking better shooting for next year’s Zebras

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Perhaps the foremost question that lingers over the Rochester boys basketball program is one over which coach Luke Smith has no control.

Will Rochester be in the same sectional with Oak Hill for the next two years?

Given that Oak Hill is 24-1 and ranked No. 2 in Class 2A and given that the Golden Eagles started only one senior in their 75-54 win over the Zebras in their Class 2A, Sectional 38 final Saturday, it might be front of mind.

While observers wait for the IHSAA to release new sectional assignments May 5 to have that question answered, there are others that Smith and his coaching staff must consider as they try to improve on a 10-13 season.

For example, who will replace the scoring punch that graduating 6-4 big man Jonas Kiser provided? Who will be next year’s point guard? And are they better at man-to-man or zone defense?

“I would say as a first-time head coach, it took a lot longer for me to get that through than I thought it would,” Smith said of his defensive philosophy. “And if I did it over again, I would spend a lot more time in the summer really trying to put the system in, but I didn’t want to go over a bunch of things twice. Because in the summer, you don’t always have your guys in the gym. So if I had that chance to do it over again, I would have started our defensive philosophy work way before Day 1 of practice. I didn’t realize how long it would take for us to really understand the switching man-to-man defense. You know, me as a new head coach as well and an assistant coach in Jake (Howdeshell), this is the way he played at Caston, and I had to play against it when I played Plymouth, and I knew how much I hated to play against it. So I was really excited about having Jake and still am excited about having Jake on my staff, and I just didn’t realize how difficult it would be to pick up.”

Smith calls defensive drills in practice “battlegrounds.” It comes from Howdeshell’s military background.

Smith said he was so focused on implementing a man-to-man early in the season that they did not work much on a zone. But by the time of the sectional semifinals against Wabash Friday, Rochester won 47-41 playing zone for just about all 32 minutes.

“It’s something you just do every day,” Smith said. “It just becomes a habit. The first 35 days of practice, if you look back at my practice plans, they all have a battleground segment in them because it just took so much time for the guys to realize how important it is to be in the proper position. Because as you saw in the Winamac game (a 62-48 loss on Dec. 5 in the second game of the season), we weren’t there yet. And the unfortunate part is we hadn’t worked on any other defense to back it up at that point, and I didn’t feel comfortable going to a zone in that Winamac game. But even though I wasn’t comfortable, I should have.”

Smith also said that the team spent so much time practicing defense that the offense suffered. Rochester scored over 50 points only once in their first seven games.

Smith said he keeps close tabs on points per possession. Only three times in 23 games – the Oak Hill game in the sectional final was one of the three – did Rochester score more than 1 point per possession.

“I was just kicking myself because I spent so much time on the defensive side,” Smith said. “But honestly, if I look back and look at the shot quality that we got, there were some games better than others. But we had a hard time putting the ball in the hole, whether we were open or not.”

Smith said he showed shot charts to players to convince players which shots were good shots and which shots were not. He also said he would take players out if they were not taking good shots.

“I have a bunch of athletes in my gym, but true basketball-only guys, there might be a couple of them, but I have mostly guys seeking the baseball trail, and obviously Grant (Clark) with football… We have a bunch of winners, right? But basketball is such a different sport where you have to have basketball skills and basketball IQ, and it took a lot longer to get where I thought we needed to be.”

Smith said that if somebody had seen Rochester only in the Oak Hill game, they might have guessed that Rochester won 15 games, even given that they lost by 21 points. Oak Hill had beaten Manchester and Lewis Cass by 43 and 38 points, respectively, and Rochester lost during the regular season to Manchester and Lewis Cass.

In some early exit interviews with players after the game, Smith asked them what they thought was the difference against Oak Hill compared to other games. He said the consensus among the players was that they had nothing to lose.

As for Smith, he said his job is to “bottle that up.”

Better shooting might help. Rochester made 110 3-pointers for the season – just under five per game – but they shot only 26% from behind the arc.

Rochester made 149 treys at a 37% clip last year when they went 17-6 in Rob Malchow’s final season. Of the 149, Drew Bowers, Tanner Reinartz and Bryce Baugher made 104 of them. All three graduated.

“You think about the way our season progressed, and early in the year, we were shooting 25 to 28 a game, but we were shooting them at 20 percent,” Smith said. “And we really had to have a long discussion in this locker room about it’s pretty much a turnover when you let that thing fly. We talked a lot about if you are going to shoot it, it needs to be on a ball reversal or on a paint touch. … We went from shooting 25 a game down to probably 15 to 16 a game because we weren’t shooting at a very high clip.

“Malchow always used to always talk about our guys don’t really hit the stride because we don’t have a lot of basketball-first guys,” Smith said. “They don’t really get their basketball legs underneath them and their shooting ability underneath them until probably mid-December, late December or early January. … I would say we shot a lot over the summer. We played a lot more than we ever have during the summer. I also saw us struggle shooting the ball in the summer. So I knew for us to win a lot of games, we had to focus a lot on defense because we had to keep the score down. … We’ve just got to get a lot more shots in this summer.”

Kiser raised his scoring average from 3.3 ppg as a sophomore to 4.9 ppg as a junior to 15.9 ppg as a senior. That included a career-high 31 points against Lewis Cass Jan. 16 and 26 in the sectional semifinal win over Wabash Friday.

Smith anticipated a big season from Kiser. He called him “one of the greatest kids you’ll be around.”

“When I saw them this summer, I think one of our first meetings as a team, I said, ‘Guys, I don’t know if you know this or not, but Jonas is your guy. He needs to put up some points for us to win some games,’” Smith said. “If you just look at Jonas and his strength and his ability to shoot the ball, I think he ended up being percentage-wise our best 3-point shooter, but he didn’t shoot a lot of 3s early in the year. And we kept trying to get him to realize that everybody is packing the paint in on him, so he’s going to have to knock down some shots just to make them stretch back out so he can get back to the paint and score at the rim, which he did really well early in the year and then he started developing his 3-point shot too. I’ve seen it since he was a sophomore, but I’ve seen him take on that role this year. It’s been exciting for him. Obviously, he’s earned (All-)TRC first team and well deserved. I’m proud of the kid.”

Mitchell Clark started the season as the point guard in the season opener, but by the end of the season, Paulik had taken the reins of the offense with Mitchell Clark’s role evolving to a reserve guard role where he played more off the ball.

“The point guard should have the toughest role on the team, and I think Carson just did a good job exemplifying what that is,” Smith said. “And I hope my guys learned from that. Carson is not a true point guard, and this is the first time he’s really had to handle the point. … On Jan. 30, I had a note in my iPad here that says: How do I get Carson more shots? Because if you look at the stats, at that time, in the last five games prior to that, I think he was shooting 40 percent from 3, but he was taking two or three shots a game. And I brought Carson in here, I shared these stats with him, and I said, ‘You have got to look to score more.’

“And honestly from then on, he scored the ball a lot better. He was a lot more looking for his at that point. And I think maybe that’s him thinking when he had the ball in his hand, he wasn’t supposed to be. He was supposed to be a distributor, but his role evolved big time after that Jan. 30 meeting I had with him.”

In addition to Kiser and Paulik, the other seniors included Jack Reffett, Grant Clark, Conner Dunfee and Ashton Musselman.

Players expected to return include honorable mention All-TRC forward Liam Spence, Mitchell Clark, Brady Coleman, Alex Chapman, Parker Casper, Aiden Wilson and Van Kiser

Smith plans on another trip to the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne for team camp in mid-June. That will be a way to not only grow as players but to see who will be next year’s team leaders.

Meanwhile, the feeder system continues to grow, according to Smith. He’s enjoyed having former Zebra players Kyle Reinartz, Billy Newton and Paul Leasure coach the eighth, seventh and sixth grade teams, respectively. He said they care about kids and about forwarding the culture Smith wants to maintain.

He also said there are around “80 or 90” kids in the third-through-fifth grade league and a similar number in the kindergarten-through-second grade coed league.

“It’s just exciting,” Smith said. “Third, fourth and fifth grade, they all just went to Warsaw this past weekend to compete in Club1 State. It’s something that you have to qualify for, and they all won or got second in their tournaments to make it there. So there’s a lot of future promise there. And obviously with my son Crew, he’s a kindergartner, so I get to go every Saturday and watch some of the kindergarten, first grade and second (grade) kids play.

“That’s a long ways down the road if I’m still around.”