Boys Basketball: Zach Carlson’s inside presence powers Newark past Indian Creek

NEWARK – It made perfect sense for Zach Carlson to score his final basket of the night just before Newark and Indian Creek emptied their benches late in the fourth quarter of Friday’s Little Ten Conference game.

After all, the Norsemen broke the game wide open once Carlson started getting the ball inside regularly as they rolled over the visiting Timberwolves 72-54.

“He is a run killer, but we struggle to look for him and that’s our big problem,” Newark coach Kyle Anderson said. “Part of it was that he wasn’t posting deep enough a lot of times early, but we struggle making sure we look for him. We try to stress it over and over because he’s our best player and we’ve got to get him the ball.”

Newark (7-8, 3-2) didn’t get a basket from Carlson until he scored to give the Norsemen a 30-18 lead with 4:25 remaining in the opening half. He finished with a game-high 19 points and grabbed eight rebounds.

“We started out shooting pretty good and then after that they started getting the ball inside to me,” Carlson said. “I think Indian Creek started to guard the outside shot a little bit better and that opened it up in the middle.”

Carlson closed the half with three more baskets inside as the Norsemen outscored the Timberwolves 22-11 in the second quarter for a 44-24 halftime advantage.

“The first quarter it was a pretty close game and then all of a sudden in that second quarter they’re up by 20 points,” Indian Creek coach Nolan Govig said. “They turned it on and we turned it over. I felt we lost our mental focus and dug ourselves a hole that was pretty hard to dig up.”

Indian Creek (3-13, 0-4) trailed by as much as 22 in the second half, but kept fighting to pull to within 49-34 after Sam Genslinger’s three-pointer with 2:12 left in the third quarter.

“We had a good effort in the second half being down by 20 and losing by [18],” Govig said. “So we played with them in the second half, but we’ve got to not have mental lapses. We need to figure it out for 32 minutes.”

While the Timberwolves were victimized by 23 turnovers, ball movement-led possessions were a huge key to the Norsemen’s ability to surpass 70 points for only the third time this season.

Cole Reibel scored 13 points, Joe Martin added 10 and Blake Wallin came off the bench in a big way. He buried three shots beyond the 3-point arc and had 12 points overall as the Norsemen had four scorers reach double digits.

“We had a lot more ball movement than normal,” Wallin said. “We had a lot of smart passes. We’d get it in the middle and kick it out or go up and they’d collapse and we were getting open shots.”

The Norsemen snapped a seven-game losing streak. Snapping off good passes was a key reason why.

“We’ve struggled against 1-3-1 (zones) and we’ve seen it a lot recently,” Anderson said. “We talked about attacking gaps and hitting opposite corners and making sure to dribble drive those gaps. It was good to see us picking that up.

Jeffrey Probst led the Timberwolves with 16 points. Landon Schrader and Everett Willis each scored nine points each, and Jakob McNally scored eight off the bench despite fouling out early in the fourth quarter.