Bulldog draws crowd

Ben Mitchell wonders how much stronger and faster he’d be if he had attended Sandpoint High School for four years, not a year and a half.

Bulldogs football coach Sean Dorris, an All-American safety at the University of Montana in his day who had a brief tryout in the NFL, knows exactly where the 6-foot-4 Mitchell would be had he been in the school’s weightlifting/conditioning program for four years, not just one.

“He’d be turning down Division I offers,” Dorris said.

Instead, Mitchell is hoping a school, any school, will give him a chance.

The sad reality is Mitchell, a senior, has a frame over which most colleges would drool. Unfortunately, he has the speed of a turtle and the strength of a junior at best. So if he ends up at a Division I school in football, he’ll be a project.

Still, despite his lack of speed, Mitchell, who transferred last winter to Sandpoint from Bonners Ferry, is perhaps the best basketball player in the Inland Empire League this season.

“There are some really, really good players in the league, but in my mind there’s no doubt that Ben’s the best,” Sandpoint coach Tyler Haynes said. “He draws the most attention.”

After Mitchell scored 22 points, hauled down 12 rebounds and dished out six assists in Sandpoint’s 67-56 win over Lakeland last Friday, Post Falls did everything but mug him the next night. Mitchell was double-teamed throughout and many times three players surrounded him in the low post.

Mitchell is coming to expect the extra attention, especially the second time around in the IEL. That’s fine in his and Haynes’ mind.

“Our offense begins with entering the ball,” Haynes explained. “Ben’s playing exactly where he needs to be. It’s not the quantity of shots he gets, it’s the quantity of touches he gets and what he does with them.”

Which explains why he ranks second on the team in assists while averaging a team-high 16.3 points and 12 rebounds per game. He’s had 11 double-doubles in 15 games.

“I get my shots,” Mitchell said. “I just understand that if a team triples down, there are cutters to the basket. As a team, we’re just starting to understand how our inside-outside game works.”

Mitchell’s move to Sandpoint was prompted by academic deficiencies.

Perhaps he was a victim of his own early athletic success. As a freshman, he was the sixth man on the varsity in basketball and ended up starting in the district championship game and ensuing games at state.

As a sophomore, he started in football and continued to start in basketball.

But laziness in the classroom caught up with him during the fall of his junior year. Although eligible by state activities association’s standards, Mitchell was suspended from the football team for the second half of the season.

That suspension was scheduled to carry over to the first two games of the basketball season, but instead he was cut from the team.

So his family moved to Sandpoint where he became immediately eligible for basketball. Bonners Ferry’s loss was Sandpoint’s gain.

“I know I became lazy in the classroom – a lot of teenagers go through it,” Mitchell said. “But I was eligible by the state’s standards. I never flunked a class or lost credits. In fact, I could graduate now after the first semester, but I’m going to take three classes next semester and find a part-time job.”

He moved to Sandpoint because he couldn’t envision going through a winter without basketball.

“It’s the sport I love the most,” he said. “So my family made a sacrifice for me.”

The other smart decision he made upon arrival at Sandpoint was getting into the weight room. Where he could barely bench press 185 pounds before, Mitchell has added 25 pounds, mostly in strength. He now lifts 240.

Mitchell wants to help Sandpoint do something it hasn’t done in boys basketball in 27 years – earn a trip to state.

“Our season is going a lot better than our record looks,” Mitchell said of the 8-7 Bulldogs. “All teams hit a peak. We’re still climbing up; we’re waiting to hit our peak. Ours is coming while some teams have already hit theirs.”

The 4A Region I tournament should be hotly contested. Post Falls is leading the league at 6-1. Moscow is next at 4-4, Sandpoint is 3-4 and Lakeland is 3-6 among the 4A teams.

Post Falls swept the season series against Sandpoint, but had to use a buzzer-beating shot for a 68-65 win in the first game and another last-second shot in overtime (62-59) last Saturday. The Bulldogs split with Moscow, winning on the road (68-65) and losing at home (48-47). Sandpoint has defeated Lakeland soundly twice.

“We still have a lot more to prove,” Mitchell said. “We haven’t had a game where everybody is clicking.”

Haynes agrees.

“We haven’t hit our stride,” he said. “The last three or four games we’ve had a much better mental picture of what we’re trying to do.”

In the middle of that portrait, as IEL teams have discovered, is Mitchell.