Boys Basketball: Drew Boetel blows up in Valparaiso victory

Updated: January 6, 2012 11:28PM

MICHIGAN CITY — The Duneland Athletic Conference is a grab bag.

Even Lake Central, thought to be clearly better than the rest of the league, went down earlier this week against Michigan City in a huge surprise.

Which is precisely why the Wolves seemed like they should’ve beaten up on Valparaiso after the Vikings lost badly on Tuesday against Merrillville at home.

Throw those rules into the lake. It’s a wide-open race, where most of the teams are pretty even and any team can win on a given night.

Valparaiso proved that when it ambushed Michigan City 52-39 Friday in a game which it basically had control of the whole way.

The victory essentially turned out to be a coming-out party for point guard Drew Boetel.

Boetel was pumped up by Valparaiso coach Joe Otis as one of the better players on the team coming back from last year on a team that didn’t have much back.

The 5-8 senior, a crafty ball-handler and point guard, hadn’t delivered the kind of scoring production that the team needed — until he banged in a career-high 27 against the Wolves. That eclipsed his previous best by 17 points.

Boetel has been getting regular pep talks from the staff about shooting the ball more.

“Coach really instilled some confidence in me,” Boetel said.

Otis said that Boetel was too “enamored with his ball-handling skills.”

“Tonight, he was the player we thought he could be,” Otis said.

And the player, at least in similar form, that Valparaiso needs him to be down the stretch.

Boetel made four three-pointers — two of them off assists from his brother, Brett, and 13 of 15 from the free-throw line.

For Boetel, the breakthrough was a welcome moment.

In practice, the coaches were pulling him out of scrimmages when he passed up open shots and not saying a word to him.

Soon enough, he started to figure it out.

It helped against Michigan City when the Vikings started out hot early, making their first couple of shots. Valparaiso jumped out to an 18-9 lead when Boetel, after a nice pass from his brother, made a three-pointer from the corner with 7:10 left in the first half.

The Wolves cut the lead to four points after a pair of free throws by Taylor Lavery with five minutes left.

Valparaiso went into its defensive high gear in the second half of the second quarter, holding Michigan City scoreless for 4:27.

A driving length-of-the-floor layup by Jabbar Washington with three seconds left ended the drought.

The Vikings were able to outscore Michigan City 7-2 in that span. They went into halftime leading 27-18.

The second half was more of the same for Valparaiso.

The Vikings were able to push their lead to 13 points in the third quarter and 17 in the fourth when Brett Boetel made a free throw with 3:30 left that gave Valparaiso a 44-27 lead.

The Vikings were able to wind the game down with both Boetel’s handling of the ball and ability to get to the free-throw line.

For Drew Boetel, after the loss to Merrillville, it was a great way to finish the work week.

“We had a lot of energy before the game and that really lifted all of us up,” he said.

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