When Scott Iten took over the Prospect Ridge Academy boys basketball program, the Miners had only won three games each of their first two seasons and were struggling to find their footing as a new athletic program.
Fast forward seven years, and the Miners are within striking distance of the first boys team title in school history.
No. 4 Prospect Ridge Academy routed No. 5 Fort Lupton on Wednesday in the Class 4A Great 8 at the Denver Coliseum, 87-64, continuing the Miners’ historic season that’s seen them set a program record with 20 wins en route to their first Final Four.
“As a relatively new school and new CHSAA program, we knew we had to build it,” Iten said of the Broomfield-based school. “Our first graduating class was 2018 with 90 kids. So the school has just grown, and we had to understand where we were as a baseline with a vision toward where we wanted to be in five, seven years.”
The K-12 school is starting to keep its talented 8th-grade athletes in-house for high school, despite the lure from top programs nearby such as Legacy, Holy Family, Broomfield and Erie.
“What changed is we had a few kids who decided they really like being Miners, and they like what this school is about,” Iten said. “They committed to us and that changed the program.”
Two of those players who decided to stay Miners dominated on Wednesday, as sophomore Jackson Brandt had a game-high 26 points and freshman Josiah Bote added 22 points.
Those two underclassmen sparked a 10-0 start by Prospect Ridge, and the Miners never looked back in a wire-to-wire win. Fort Lupton was never within shouting distance of replicating its 83-82 victory over Prospect Ridge on Jan. 14 in Broomfield.
“We knew we were going to come out with a huge start, because they beat us earlier in the season and we had to get revenge,” Brandt said. “We came out with fire.”
Fort Lupton went on a brief run in the second quarter to make things interesting, but the Blue Devils couldn’t sustain that swell. They were plagued by 27 turnovers, which the Miners converted into 30 points. And in the battle of the full-court presses, Prospect Ridge’s game-long pressure was much more effective than Fort Lupton’s, which had its press consistently broken.
“We moved the ball through the air well, we consistently beat the press — and we all can shoot,” Brandt said. “Tough to stop us when we’re playing like that.”
Senior 6-foot-7 big man Guillaume Nkiadiambu led the Bluedevils with 22 points, but Iten explained that the Miners were more than willing to give up points in the paint versus letting Fort Lupton’s guards take over, as they did in the teams’ previous meeting. Senior guard Isaiah Garcia had 17 points, but that was the worst of the damage from that position.
“We learned their guards were really good, and we put an emphasis on making sure someone else scored,” Iten said. “In that first game, (Garcia) went for 35 points against us, and a lot of that was uncontested. Which was not like us. We’ve changed so much since then; who we are as a defensive unit from then to now is night and day.”
The Miners will take on the winner of Wednesday’s nightcap between No. 1 Kent Denver and No. 25 The Academy in Friday’s Final Four.
The Sun Devils are the heavy favorite in the bracket, and beat the Miners 91-72 on Feb. 11. But Prospect Ridge believes it has the momentum and talent to win two more games and finish on top.
“If we continue to be us, we’ll win the whole thing,” Brandt said. “We had a few losses during the start of the season, and there were doubts on our team, but we kept grinding through the whole year. We’re at a good spot right now. This is the beginning of our program’s emergence. We’re going to put our name on the map this year.”
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