The Juneau-Douglas High School boys basketball team knows it’s up against a challenge.
They face the best team in the state — the 26-1 Dimond High School — in the first round of the 2018 ASAA/First National Bank Alaska Basketball State Championships in Anchorage Thursday evening.
“I’m not sure what we’re going to be able to do to them that 26 others couldn’t figure out all year long,” JDHS head coach Robert Casperson said.
The count of teams Dimond has beaten this year is actually less than 20, but that just means they’ve handed out two or more losses to eight different teams. Chugiak, who plays West Valley in the first round, is the only team to have come away a win over the Lynx.
Thursday’s game should be entertaining. After all, the Crimson Bears thrive on proving others wrong.
JDHS won three straight elimination games in the Region V tournament two weeks ago to claim the region championship. They accomplished the same feat at last year’s Region V championships, too, and went on to take fourth at the state tournament.
This is perhaps why the person who holds this team together, senior Erik Kelly, was recently named Knight’s Taxidermy/Alaska Association of Basketball Coaches 4A boys player of the year.
Kelly made the game-winning basket to help JDHS narrowly evade an early exit from this year’s Region V tournament against Thunder Mountain High School. Two days later, Kelly did his thing with 22 points and 24 rebounds to help JDHS knock off Ketchikan in the championship game.
Talk about rising to the occasion — many players don’t get 24 rebounds in a month’s worth of games.
It’s that quality, rebounding, Casperson brings up when speaking of the senior’s strengths.
“He’s like a bloodhound for a rebound, he’s going to find that thing no matter what,” he said.
Kelly has 360 rebounds in 27 games this season (13 per game), three times more than any other player on the team.
“Not a whole lot of people that I know of get a bunch of 20 rebound games, and for me personally, that’s what I strive to get,” said Kelly, who has four this season. “Because then that helps better the team and gives us more chances to score. And then Coach owes me steak dinners because they have a team goal for us to get 15 —but probably 20 rebounds for me.”
After Kelly made third-team all-state as a junior, Casperson knew Kelly deserved a spot of the first-team this season.
“My biggest concern was that people maybe wouldn’t have heard enough about him or seen him and stuff this year to make the first-team all-state,” Casperson said. “Then turn around, lo and behold, here he is rated the best player in 4A.”
Kelly said Southeast players don’t typically get as much respect as other players around the state do.
“I just like how somebody from Southeast got it,” Kelly said. “Because not a whole lot of Southeast players get a whole lot of recognition that they should get.”
As for the Crimson Bears as a whole earning respect around the state, that will come with an upset Thursday.
JDHS dropped two games to Dimond in Juneau in early February. And those losses may just be what helps the Crimson Bears stun the Lynx.
“I think that’s really the mark of this year is they saw their failures as opportunities to get better,” Casperson said. “And that’s kind of what we tried to do, we tried to make sure we were playing our best basketball in March, by figuring out what we were doing wrong in December, January and February.”
The NFHS Network (www.nfhsnetwork.com/tournament/alaska-march-madness) will stream all 11 games of the tournament.
• Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nainsworth@juneauempire.com. Follow Empire Sports on Twitter at @akempiresports.
