One game at a time

BURLINGTON - The goal for the Burlington Huskies this week at the 1A State boys basketball tournament is to focus on the game at hand and not get ahead of themselves by penciling themselves in the championship game. It becomes rather pointless to look ahead when you have yet to win the game right in front of you.

"We're going to take it one game at a time and the boys are pretty good at focusing on the task at hand and moving to the next after that is completed," said BHS boys basketball coach Matt Davidson.

After cruising through the regular season and not dropping a game against 1A competition, the Huskies were reminded that the postseason is a different beast.

In the 1A West regional quarterfinals, the Huskies had to fight off a pesky Little Snake River team on the way to a 68-64 win; in the semifinals they needed 48 combined points from seniors Torey Wardell and Dallin Davidson to finish off Saratoga 71-62; and in the finals needed double-overtime to win their fifth-straight regional championship 64-61 against Farson-Eden.

"That Southwest conference we found out is very strong. All of those teams were good and fundamentally sound. That was good for us and made us realize that we're going to have to keep fighting," said Davidson.

One of the bright spots of the Huskies regional championship win was their depth playing strong during crunch-time. Davidson, the team's second-leading scorer at 15.2 points per game, fouled out late in the game, but reserves, senior, Derec Davidson and, sophomore, Jarom Davidson were the next men up and helped their team to a victory.

"They [Farson-Eden] had kids step up and we had kids step up as well. Derec Davidson had I think his best game of the year and a lot of that was during the last overtime. He made a big three, went 3 of 4 on free throws and played good defense. Jarom Davidson had to go in for his brother and helped foul those [Farson-Eden] big guys out and was able to keep the defensive pressure going," said Davidson.

Winning three more games at state is going to require the Huskies to sharpen their top-ranked defense. For the final week of practice, Davidson wants his players to lock-in on their defense and put together a complete four quarters on that end, for each game.

"One thing we talked about last night is that in all three regional games our defense was more effective and efficient in the first half of each of those games. Then it seemed to slow some in the second half. We have to get four good quarters with no letdowns, that's going to be our focus for this week," said Davidson.

The Huskies open the 1A state tournament against the Rock River Longhorns, who are making their first state tournament appearance since 1971, at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, at the Casper Events Center.