By: Michael Del Genio
Dominican men’s basketball falls in a hard-fought 90-85 overtime thriller to Eureka College in their home opener.. In a tightly contested game with 23 lead changes, sophomore captain Lucas Underwood and senior Dominic Crapia led the way with scoring 24 and 17, respectively, with the team shooting at a 37% clip from the field.
The star’s fast-paced and high physicality style of play showed out in full force with forcing 22 total turnovers and scoring 42 points inside the paint.
Coach Troy Tonsil, entering his third year as the head coach, says, “I think we’re really matching ourselves with the times; the game is not played necessarily in the half-court. The game is played in a kind of an up-and-down style. When you see us this year, the pace will be different than what it has been in the past. It speaks to the type of players that we have in our program.”
Guard Lucas Underwood, who was electric his freshman year, having earned a starting role, says, “Going at it at practice, competing really hard and getting us ready, just making each other better. Iron sharpens iron…We definitely have more grit and more of the younger guys coming in have the expectation to win.”
Team togetherness and communication have long been preached by Coach Tonsil through his years, and sophomore Frank Paszkowski follows it, “Everybody wants to play on the court, it’s a team sport. We over me. Everybody understands they may not play, then they still got to contribute on and off the court. Even if they’re on the bench, clapping and just giving out energy. You never know when your time is going to come.”
The team enters the season with only five upperclassmen, highlighted by seniors Dominic Crapia and Adrian Pelszynski, who have both played perennial starter roles for the team. The youth shows in the team, having only played three of the five upperclassmen, with Antony Fernandez getting some minutes in the opener. Crapia and Pelszynski both started the game.
“I just think, especially for younger guys, you’ve got to keep it simple. You got your day-to-day, it has to be us doing what we do and keeping with the rhythm. Once you start doing all these different things and kind of confuse them or give them too much, then they can’t really function… You’ve got to give them a level of comfort to be like, Hey, let’s keep it simple. We’re not going to do stuff that we haven’t done. Keep it simple every day so you can digest it,” Tonsil says.
Despite simplicity, two freshmen featured the home opener with heavy minutes, including guards Chase LeFevre and Elijah Daughtery.
The team fought hard to stay in it in the closing seconds of regulation, with two missed free throws from Eurekas Jaxson Provost leading the team to overtime. In overtime, the team shot 1-8 from the field in which they faced their first major blow of the season.
In the last twenty seconds of overtime, down four points, captain Lucas Underwood drove in for a layup and came down hard, leaving the game with an apparent knee injury. Earlier this week, fellow captain Dean O’Brien went down with a sprained ankle as well.
Paszkowski comments on adversity as a team, “Adversity is always going to come. And whenever we have negative moments during the season, we can’t let that affect us. We just have to fight over and push through and just bounce back off it.”
“This year, it’s different, because we’re so young that we understand we are a team. The ego isn’t really there.”
Despite the early injuries and initial loss to the season, men’s basketball is just getting started with many games to come.
