Nicholls trying to rebound with second star on shelf

The Nicholls State men’s basketball team’s two headed monster has now shrunk in half.

And the Colonels are still figuring out a way to pick up the pieces and rebound to make the Southland Conference Tournament.

With junior forward Fred Hunter sidelined for the remainder of the season with a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), the once heralded Colonels have lost some of their swagger and are reeling heading into the stretch run of the conference season.

“I don’t know that we have quite figured out how to replace him, because we’ve lost the first two games since he’s gone down,” Colonels’ coach J.P. Piper said. “We’re still working at it. The bottom line is just that the younger guys are going to have to step up and some of the older guys are going to have to shift some of their responsibilities.”

In Hunter, the Colonels lost 16 points per game on offense – a void Nicholls has struggled to cover since his injury.

Senior guard Kenny Franklin said for that void to be filled, every Colonels player will need to give an accelerated effort to pitch in a handful more points per game than they previously were averaging.

“More people have got to step up. It’s as simple as that,” Franklin said. “We’ve got to play more as a team, now more so than ever and we’ve all just got to make more plays. It’s up to all of us to get it done. Myself and Ben Martin, we’ve got to make shots. Kellan Carter, he’s got to get stuff down under the basket and [Anatoly] Bose, he’s just got to step up and make more things happen than he’s already making happen. There won’t be any one person who will make this happen. It’s on all of us.”

Martin held the same line of thinking as his point guard, but added that he believes Hunter’s biggest void isn’t in scoring at all. He said the team misses Hunter’s size down low and is struggling to get the six rebounds per game Hunter averaged.

The statistics prove Martin right, as Nicholls has been outrebounded in every game Hunter has missed, including against Stephen F. Austin when Nicholls was hammered 45-17 on the glass.

“The main focus is rebounding without a question,” Martin said. “His six-to-10 rebounds per game were critical to our success. We’ve just got to buckle down and each get a few. Like me, I’m averaging two rebounds a game. If I can grab four, that’s not asking much from me. If we get four from Kenny, that’s not asking much from Kenny, either. It’s all about shifting our mindset. I’m not used to going crash boards, but now I know I have to in order for us to win.”

Piper said that’s a challenge because scoring involves skill, but rebounding requires toughness, something that his young players are learning as the season goes on.

“To me, the scoring is easier than the rebounding,” Piper said. “Rebounding involves knocking somebody out of the way and going get that ball and Fred physically was almost born to do that, because he can move people out of the way and he has big, ole bear hands.”

But Piper and the Nicholls players know they lost far more than just statistics, but also one of the team’s leaders and most emotional players.

Hunter’s injury occurred in practice and Piper said he struggled to hold back tears after informing the team the severity of the injury.

“It’s devastating,” he said. “I struggled to not break down, really. When he left the floor and the trainer came back and reported back to me what he suspected, then they let him sit for 30 minutes and tested his knee again and the trainer comes to you and tells you, ‘Look, Coach, it’s torn,’ … breaking that news to the team was hard. I was choked up.”

With the shock of the injury now out of the way, Nicholls used a mid-week bye from conference play last week to try and take a deep breath and “reinvent” themselves to stay afloat in the hunt for a spot in the conference tournament.

The Colonels coach said that the only way they can do Hunter justice is to rally together and finishing the season strong.

Piper and his team believe the Colonels have it in them to do so.

Either way, they aren’t going down without a fight, no matter who’s on the floor and available to play.

“We’ve been given a setback, but we’re not in panic mode by any means,” Martin said. “We know we’ve still got all of our goals in front of us.”