Basketball is never too far from Boone Grove junior Jack Stevens’ mind.
Even on the golf course.
“He’s definitely fun to be around,” senior guard Gavin Lucas said. “He’s a funny guy. He definitely loves basketball. We golf a lot over the summer, and he’s always just talking about how much he loves AAU and how much he wants to get back to playing basketball.”
Stevens takes the sport seriously too.
“He’s definitely a big asset,” Lucas said. “He wants everyone to be better. He wants everyone around him to be better. You can tell he cares a lot. If you mess up, he definitely shows you that he cares.”
Stevens holds himself to that same high standard. The 6-foot-1 guard averages a team-high 15.9 points, 3.6 rebounds, 1.4 assists and 1.4 steals as the Wolves (10-12) prepare to play in the opening round of the Class 3A Calumet Sectional against favorite Bishop Noll (17-7) on Wednesday. Stevens expects to continue expanding his game.
“I’ve been scoring a lot more,” he said. “Since Iast year, I’ve really improved on that. I’m trying to do a lot more over the summer, though, to include defense, ballhandling, a lot more improvement from this year to next year, a lot more skills and success.
“Over this past summer, it was just a lot more shooting than the year before that. My sophomore year, I didn’t really have a role as a scorer until the end of the season. Then I stepped up. From this past summer, I knew I had to have a bigger role.”
After spending his freshman season on the junior varsity team, Stevens averaged a team-high 12.4 points last season. But it took some time for him to hit his stride at the varsity level.
“I realized it was a big difference,” he said. “Varsity’s a lot faster than JV, and toward the beginning of the year, I wasn’t really in the groove of the speed. But on and on, closer to the middle of the season, I got used to it and scored a lot more points and was really in the flow of the game. That got me to where I am.
“The middle of the season last year, I really just decided I wanted to be a main scorer for the team and put some points on the board for us. That’s where I’ve succeeded a lot from last year to this year.”
As Stevens has developed into a go-to scorer, second-year Boone Grove coach Dean Hill has noticed a difference in the way teams have defended him. He said Stevens often draws opponents’ top defenders, and they’ve taken to face-guarding him.
“He’s finding out, now that he’s putting up 16, 17 points a game, all of a sudden, the other teams know who you are,” Hill said. “’When you were a sophomore, the other teams really didn’t know who you were. Now you’re a junior, everyone knows who you are.’
“So he’s going to have to learn how to deal with that going into next year. He’s already talked to me, like, ‘I know I need to put in work in the weight room. I want to play college basketball, and I need to know what I need to work on and somebody to push me to do it.’ That’s the attitude you need to have about it if you’re going to do it.”
Indeed, if anyone is prepared for that process, Stevens is. He has been a key player for the Wolves, who have doubled their wins from last season, when they went 5-17, and have the potential to keep growing behind a strong junior class.
“Jack is always willing to put in the work,” Hill said. “If the gym’s open, he’s there. If there’s an optional shooting, an optional practice, stay after, come early, he’s like, ‘Hey, can we get the shooting gun out so we can get some shots up?’ He’s definitely that kind of kid. He would never miss a summer workout or any kind of workout.”
Stevens also has the support of his family. His father, also named Jack, starred at Lake Station, where he led the Region in scoring as a junior before graduating in 1994. Stevens’ sister Taylor, a 2017 Boone Grove graduate, helped lead the softball team to the Class 2A state championship game in 2015 and 2016 before playing at Ohio State and Purdue Northwest.
Stevens, who grew up playing baseball, joined Boone Grove’s boys golf team last spring. He is leaning toward not participating in any high school sport this spring in order to focus on basketball.
Hill, a 2013 Boone Grove graduate, starred in football, basketball and baseball before continuing his basketball career at Indiana-Kokomo. He’s also the boys golf coach and noted four of his five top players on that team play basketball. He has Stevens’ back no matter what Stevens decides to do after the basketball season.
“First he was only playing AAU,” Hill said. “Then he was playing baseball again. Then he wasn’t playing anything. Then he was playing golf. Now he’s not playing golf. I’m like, ‘Dude, why would you not play golf? You get to go to the golf course and play for two hours.’
“He has Saturday and Sunday stuff with basketball, which I totally understand. I played AAU basketball. We have two or three weekend matches, and I’m like, ‘You can miss the weekend matches and play all of the weekday ones.’ We’ll see what happens. Whatever he wants to do.”
Hill also understands Stevens’ perspective.
“Jack is the first basketball-first kid we’ll have since (2022 graduate) Trey Steinhilber,” Hill said. “Every one of our athletes plays more than one sport, and he’s the only varsity guy who will be a basketball-first kid.
“He’s a basketball junkie, for sure.”
