Team of the Year: Close games, toughness defined Bonneville’s banner year | News, Sports, Jobs

WASHINGTON TERRACE — Boys basketball season is, has been and probably will be for the foreseeable future, a high-heart-rate affair at Bonneville High.

Of the Lakers’ 25 games in the 2021-22 season, 17 were decided by single digits and of those 17, six were single-possession games.

Time after time, even as late game-winning shots and game-winning defensive stops mounted, the Lakers rarely faltered.

Bonneville is the All-Area Boys Basketball Team of the Year after a season that saw the Lakers go 20-5 overall, win their first region championship since 2004, win three playoff games and advance to the 5A state semifinals.

They had a penchant for being resilient, tough and grinding out every single game, which has been a common theme of recent Bonneville teams.

The difference with this year’s Laker team, players and coaches said throughout the year, is there was a little more of a mix of offensive and defensive ability compared to previous teams that mainly leaned on a suffocating defense.

They also had lofty ambitions. Those inside the program said the team’s goals in November included winning a state championship.

Speaking after a 6-0 start to the season, senior Koy Dixon wasn’t surprised Bonneville was so good, so early.

“No way. We’ve got big goals this year and we’re excited and we’re just gonna keep going. State championship,” Dixon said. “We just play so good together, we’ve been playing together for a long, long time, like second grade. We have a great coaching staff, they’re always getting us ready, scouting reports and all that.”

To the outsider, that may have sounded crazy. Even to head coach Kyle Bullinger, it sounded a little crazy.

“I said a lot of things to them that you can’t print, that’s what it was. We just tried to take it one game at a time,” Bullinger said after the Lakers’ playoff win against Alta.

“When you’re a high school coach with a group that comes in with not a lot of experience other than Carson (Jones), you’re sitting here going, ‘Talk can be pretty cheap in October and November,’ but even when we hit a few bumps in the road … these kids never lost confidence in one another.”

Ultimately, the Lakers proved they belonged in the conversation and their preseason goals weren’t so far-fetched. They won three playoff games, highlighted by a 55-54 state quarterfinal win against a much bigger Alta team, before ultimately falling in the state semifinals to Olympus.

In Region 5, each team had something noteworthy that made matchups difficult for Bonneville.

Woods Cross had arguably the two of the three most talented players in the region. Box Elder had a potent scoring duo. Northridge arguably had the best guard, while Viewmont and Bountiful happen to be matchup nightmares for Bonneville, particularly.

Eight of Bonneville’s 10 region games were decided by single digits. Four of those eight were one-possession finishes, punctuated by a 54-51 win over Woods Cross in a winner-take-all game for the region title, a win secured by a last-second 3-pointer from Jake Williams.

After the gauntlet, the trophy resides in Bonneville’s cabinet.

“To say that we won the league in a year with this much talent, this much parity, I’m really proud of our guys for doing it,” Bullinger said after the Lakers beat Woods Cross in the regular-season finale.

The drama didn’t stop there as three single-digit playoff wins followed, leaving Bonneville as one of four teams left. After the quarterfinal win against Alta at the Huntsman Center, Bullinger was asked how the Lakers kept winning so many close games.

“They’ve been a tight-knit group the entire time. Our locker room has never been an issue. And those are cliche things that every coaching staff talks about, but it’s been really important,” Bullinger said.

Jones said after the Woods Cross game: “It’s really tough, it’s fun though. Really fun. Playing games where it’s a two-point game going into the fourth quarter, it’s always fun because there’s always a lot of hype around them.”

Bonneville won the region in a year where it returned one starter, that being Jones, and even that wasn’t certain. There were worries about Jones early in the season because a knee injury suffered in football season caused him to miss a few football games and her wore a knee brace afterward.

But Jones ended up being the Lakers’ best and most reliable player, averaging 14 points and seven rebounds per game while shooting 56% from the field.

Junior point guard Bo Dixon was the second part of a formidable one-two Bonneville punch. He averaged 11 points and five assists per game, with two of his biggest games coming in the middle of region play — most notably a 29-point, 14-of-14 foul-shooting night against Northridge.

Senior Joe Tesch was the team’s best rebounder and on that note, snagged an offensive board and kicked out to Williams for that game-winning 3 against Woods Cross.

The Lakers had enough depth and moxie in tough moments to make things work.

“I think these kids make our community proud,” Bullinger said. “I look around at the way they conduct themselves in the classroom and the hallways at our school, they’re everything we as coaches want to have student-athletes.”

This was Bullinger’s seventh year in charge at Bonneville and his first region championship breakthrough after a few prior seasons where the Lakers came close.

The blueprint has been drawn now for how future Bonneville teams can win a region trophy.

If one wants to be nit-picky, there’s also a blueprint now on how to cut down a net, which the players were, ahem, not as adept at doing thanks to a dull pair of scissors and one player inadvertently cutting the last strand down before Bullinger could get up on the ladder.

“We didn’t practice that, I think that’d be bad karma,” Bullinger said.

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