7 key takeaways from Rockford-area Thanksgiving basketball tournaments

A busy week of Thanksgiving basketball tournaments ended Saturday, with Auburn playing its third out-of-state team in four games in its Fred VanVleet Classic named for its greatest player. And with Boylan’s tournament ending by naming the most famous gym in the NIC-10 after the league’s all-time winningest coach.

Here are some key takeaways from area season-opening tournaments:

Fred’s tournament is a hit

The out-of-state teams lived up to their hype in the FVV Classic at Auburn, with Memphis Douglass (4-0), Choctaw, Oklahoma (2-0) and Legacy of Spring, Texas (2-0) combining to go 8-0. And all 12 teams have told Auburn coach Bryan Ott — who put together this tourney to replace the old 205 Tip-Off Classic — that they want to come back.

“Nothing is official until contracts are assigned, but that’s what it sounds like,” Ott said of teams all returning. “It’s what we wanted. I would have been very disappointed if someone had decided, ‘This isn’t for us.’ I think we have the right teams and we have room for more, because originally there were six more games on the schedule, but I would be happy if it was exactly the same field next year.”

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Boylan names gym after Steve Goers

Boylan dedicated its newly refurbished main gym floor as “Steve Goers Court” before the tourney’s final game Saturday night. Goers was 752-206 at Boylan. Counting his previous stints at Oswego, LaSalle-Peru and Harvard, Geors ranks third all-time in state history with 881 wins. Goers thanks everyone, from Boylan leaders to assistant coaches to players to the thousands of kids who attended his Fightin' Titan youth basketball camp for 31 years.

"A lot of important people in my life supported me and supported our program to accomplish some pretty successful seasons," Goers said. "It wouldn’t have been possible without the leadership of our administration. If you don’t have leadership at the top, it’s difficult to succeed as a coach."

Rakim Chaney could join Zach Couper

Boylan’s Couper, six years ago, was the last NIC-10 player to average 20 points. That included a 50-point game in a one-point comeback win at Auburn. Chaney is averaging 22.3 points after his first four games for Auburn, scoring inside and out.

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Auburn needs to get tougher

Auburn (0-4) is the clear NIC-10 favorite. And being winless is misleading because two of those games were overtime losses (to Chicago Whitney Young and Memphis Douglass) and the four teams it lost to are a combined 9-1. Still, Auburn hasn’t played the way it wants to, relying almost exclusively on Rakim Chaney and Amir Danforth for its scoring, not rebounding well enough and not winning the turnover battles.

“We just played four championship caliber teams, and if we want to be where they are at we have to get a lot tougher,” Ott said. “Tougher with the lead. Tougher at the beginning. Tougher at the end. We have to get a lot tougher all the way around. Do little things like dive on the floor for loose balls and take charges. Doing those things is the difference between beating and not beating a championship caliber team. You can’t just rely on your skill training and your athleticism and your ability to shoot the ball, because when you are playing another team that has all that, then you have to be able to rest on your defense.

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“We’re known as a defensive team around here, but we didn’t get key stops when we needed them.”

Auburn also didn’t force many turnovers.

“Not in any of these games,” Ott agreed. “Whenever we had runs to get back in games, defense had a lot to do with it, but we couldn’t sustain it. We weren’t consistent with it. We have a long way to go in terms of being us. Most of our runs were predicated on our defense giving us better shots, cleaner ones. When I’m talking about toughness, I’m talking about offensive execution as well. We’re not screening well. And we’re not taking care of the ball well.”

Best Belvidere North team ever

Belvidere North has never even been .500 in the NIC-10 in school history. That should change this year. North went 3-1 at the FVV Classic. The one loss was by a single point to Chicago Perspectives, which went 4-0 in the tourney and trailed by four points until scoring the last five points of the game.

“It was very encouraging,” North coach Todd Brannan said. “This group of seniors is the first group that we started our youth travel program with. And a lot of them had a lot of playing time last year because we had so many injuries. We pretty much started five juniors all year.”

One of those, though, was Joseph Brown, who also started the last half of his sophomore season. Brown is out for at least a few more weeks with a shoulder injury suffered in the first round of the football playoffs.

New girls basketball power

Freeport Aquin has its best team since winning back-to-back Class 1A state titles with three-time All-Pac-10 star Sophie Brunner in 2012 and 2013. The Bulldogs are off to a 6-0 start and beat defending Class 2A runner-up Byron and River Ridge/Scales Mound, which has been state-ranked in 1A the last two years, in the Dakota tournament.

Paityn London, their 5-8 freshman guard, received NCAA Division I scholarship offers before her first game and Megan Holder is a returning all-conference player in both volleyball and basketball. But Aquin has been most impressive with its aggressive 2-3 zone defense. It held RR/SM to 24 points and erased a seven-point half-time deficit against Byron by holding the Tigers to 11 points in the second half.

“Teams aren’t used to us being on you right away,” Aquin coach Josh Glawe said. “A 2-3 has a lot of helping, but we play a kind of combination defense and are disruptive. We make teams have to put the ball on the floor to score where they may be more accustomed to just catching and shooting. It also leads to a lot of steals.”

A 3rd scorer for Orangeville

Orangeville has set school records for wins each of the last two seasons and is the two-time defending NUIC North champ. That division is more stacked than ever, led by Orangeville (4-0), Aquin (6-0) and Pecatonica (4-1). Pec’s lone loss was a 43-31 nail-biter to Class 3A Dixon, which is unbeaten at 6-0.

Orangeville’s signature win so far was 37-36 over Stillman Valley, which returns most of its stars from a Class 2A team that was 28-7 last year. Whitney Sullivan, a 6-3 Tulsa recruit, drove the length of the floor in the last seven seconds to score the winning basket at the buzzer.

“I think they forgot she was left-handed,” Orangeville coach Jay Doyle said.

The Broncos have always played strong defense, but Sullivan and her all-conference cousin Laney Cahoon were the bulk of Orangeville’s offense the last two years. Nadalee Doyle, who started as a freshman, has made a leap as a sophomore. All three averaged around 12 points in Orangeville’s four games and were all named to Forreston’s all-tournament team.

“We spend a lot of time defensively on how to play and offensively we are how we are,” coach Doyle said. “We have seen growth in all three players, but the biggest jump I’ve seen is from Nadalee. She is hitting jumpers and 3s.”

Contact: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com, @matttrowbridge or 815-987-1383. Matt Trowbridge has covered sports for the Rockford Register Star for over 30 years, after previous stints in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Key takeaways from Rockford-area season-opening basketball tourneys