GFS struggles through injuries, beats Abington Friends

Posted 2/3/16

Germantown Friends School's Mike Buckmire works by a Franklin Learning Center defender. Buckmire notched 26 in the Tigers’ 51-37 win.[/caption] by Jonathan Vander Lugt At the beginning of the …

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GFS struggles through injuries, beats Abington Friends

Posted

Germantown Friends School's Mike Buckmire works by a Franklin Learning Center defender. Buckmire notched 26 in the Tigers’ 51-37 win. Germantown Friends School's Mike Buckmire works by a Franklin Learning Center defender. Buckmire notched 26 in the Tigers’ 51-37 win.[/caption]

by Jonathan Vander Lugt

At the beginning of the season, Germantown Friends basketball coach Shawn Werdt said that there were going to be five players that wound up getting the lion's share of the team's minutes.

Apparently, that turned out to be the worst kind of jinx. Rarely, if at all in the last month have the Tigers went into a game with the lineup they drew up in the preseason. Currently, they're down starters Sam Istvan and Charlie Dolgenos to non-basketball-related maladies (see “Poor luck...”).

They can't get back to full strength soon enough, because before their win on Thursday over Abington Friends, league losses to Friends Central, Westtown, Academy of the New Church, and Shipley came by a combined 157 points—that is not a typo—for an average of a whopping 39 points per.

Fortunately for Werdt's sanity, Mike Buckmire seems healthy (though he did sprain his foot a couple of weeks ago, requiring a few games of missed time) and firing on all cylinders.

He, unquestionably the beating heart that will have to keep GFS alive, scored 26 paired with four boards and seven steals in the Tigers' 51-37 comeback win over Franklin Learning Center Saturday, the team's second straight victory.

“It came down to him looking around and seeing that he needed to carry the load, or we were going to lose the game,” Werdt said. “He decided we weren't.”

GFS struggled out of the gate, missing shots and committing costly turnovers while slopping their way to a 14-8 first-quarter deficit. Buckmire's point total read the same as the number on his jersey: 0.

“Everything went wrong in that first quarter,” Buckmire said. “We were really just slow out of the gate.”

“Right before the second quarter coach challenged me to be a bit more aggressive,” he went on. “He told me to lead these guys, because that's what we needed.”

By the time they had trimmed the deficit a bit to head into the half down 19-16, Buckmire had eight points and the seeds for an outburst had been sown.

“After that, things kind of opened up, shots started to fall, and we went with it,” Buckmire said.

“Sometimes Mike needs to be reminded that he's often the best player on the floor,” Werdt said. “I think it took a little while for that lightbulb to go off.”

That's not surprising—the lanky junior prides himself on getting his teammates involved—almost, at times, to a fault.

“That was one of our problems in the first quarter,” he admitted. “I wasn't aggressive. Even though I could have taken some shots, I was passive and trying not to just take stupid shots.”

That's not always a bad thing given that he, who Werdt describes as possibly being not only the sharpest on the team, but in the whole school, knows that scoring when it comes in a high volume of shots isn't the best or most efficient way to run an offense. His 26 points came on 60 percent shooting from the field.

“I do pride myself on getting other people into the game,” he said. “I want to get us all confident, and take over when the time comes.”

That time was the third quarter. GFS scored 20 in the frame—12 off of Buckmire's hot hand—while stifling FLC's offense to build an 11-point lead before heading into the game's final frame.

Buckmire's brilliance was on its best display early in the third. He knocked down a pair of free throws, stole the inbound pass, and put in a layup right away. That's a pretty good sequence of events in and of itself, but he tipped away the inbound immediately following his basket, threw another one up, and got fouled.

He drilled both (two more out of a perfect 12-12 day from the stripe), capping a six-point flurry that happened in the span of about 10 seconds and signaled that the game was his to lose. He scored six more in the fourth, as Germantown Friends needed only to tread water to seal the win.

“This is another confidence builder for us,” Buckmire, whose recruitment so far has been mostly limited to academically well-regarded Division III schools, said. “We're hoping to get into our league playoffs.”

The Friends League season is capped with a five-team playoff. The conference's top three finishers get a brief bye while the four-and-five seeds duke it out for a date with what will likely be either of the three teams that shellacked GFS earlier in the conference season.

Buckmire went on, “We're really trying to go into that playoff game as hot as possible, peaking at the right time.”

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