Bob Becker’s coaching numbers are scary good. Two victories Saturday – 54-40 over Lincoln-Way Central and 48-40 over U High – gave him 400 in his 18th season as the Morton High School Lady Potters coach. Victories are coming at an accelerating pace. The first 100 took six seasons, the last 100 took only three seasons. All that is good, even wonderful. But I am here to tell you that numbers are lifeless things, ink on paper, pixels on your screen. You can learn more about Becker’s work by noticing a player’s smile that lit up the Potterdome today.

The smile belonged to Tenley Dowell. She’s a sophomore. She’s 5-foot-11 and she’s very good with the ball. She can score from outside and she can score from inside and she can score on the break with either hand. Against Lincoln-Way today, she broke out in smiles and not because of anything she did on offense but what she did defensively.

I had to look twice. In the heat of play at full speed, who smiles? Contesting a pass, who has time to smile? But there she was, Tenley Dowell aglow. She was a girl having the time of her basketball life, trapping a ball-handler, arms everywhere, closing off every option, ruining that poor girl’s day.

So I asked, why the smiles?

“It’s fun, trapping, stealing the ball,” she said.

But sometimes, I said, you didn’t steal it, you just made it possible for someone else to steal the bad pass you forced.

“YEAH,” Dowell said.

Two things by which we might measure Bob Becker’s career . . .

1. He won his 100th game in his sixth season, 200th in his 10th season, and 300th in his 14th. His Potters have won the last two Class 3A state championships. After back-to-back 33-3 seasons, they’re 19-1 this season. They’ve won 85 of their last 92 games.

2. And Tenley Dowell, a really good offensive player in a game that glorifies scorers, is having so much fun on defense that she sometimes breaks into a smile. That, my friends, is coaching.

Small wonder, then, that Lincoln-Way Central’s coach, Dave Campanile, saw all that and more in his team’s defeat: “The biggest thing was Morton’s pressure on the ball. We turned it over too much. And then they got hot, they got out on the break, they scored in transition. They were having a good time. They were passionate on both sides of the ball.”

Unlike the night before when Morton played as if entitled to victory against a mediocre Metamora team, the Potters this morning played with the urgency born of real competition. Lincoln-Way Central is a 4A team that came in with an 11-6 record. Properly concerned, Becker had written three pre-game messages on his whiteboard, telling his Lady Potters:

“Make them uncomfortable”
“Relentless”
“Windex”

At jangling a poor girl’s nerves with unforgiving pressure at both ends, the Lady Potters are superb; there would be no problem in discomfiting the Lincoln-Way Central people. But to suggest the Potters wipe clean the glass, the coach seemed to have asked too much of his rebounders, struggling of late.

Early in the second quarter, Lincoln-Way Central led, 18-14. About then, as in many Potters games, their relentless pressure – attacking on both offense and defense – produced a 19-2 run that, after halftime, became a 34-8 domination. “Make them uncomfortable”? The Potters made them crazy. In that time I made this note “Tenley laffing on def.”

We should give that extraordinary 34-8 run a little play-by-play on the scoring . . .

First came two free throws by Brandi Bisping, then a layup by her. Dowell followed with a steal and layup. Josi Becker a 3, then two 3’s by Bisping 43 seconds apart. A Becker steal produced a Dowell layup, and Dowell closed the half at the buzzer by stealing an in-bounds pass and dropping it in.

That’s the 19-2 part of the run. The next 15 points: Caylie Jones a driving hook off the glass, then a drive through traffic for a layup-and-one. Kassidy Shurman a 3 from the deep left corner. Jacey Wharram a layup off a Becker pass. Then a 3 by Becker and a layup by her sister, Maddy.

That made it 48-26, Morton, at the end of three. Game Over.

In Bisping’s third game back after missing five games with mononucleosis, she made her first 3-pointers since Dec. 20 and led Morton’s scoring with 15 (13 in that second quarter). Caylie Jones had 9, Josi Becker 8, Dowell 7, Shurman 6, Lindsey Dullard 3, and 2 each from Bridget Wood, Maddy Becker, and Wharram.

Speaking of “Windex,” as we were, I thought the Potters did OK. Their statistician insisted, however, that they left the glass near-spotless. The Potters’ chart had them with 20 rebounds, led by Courtney Jones’s 6, to Lincoln-Way Central’s 10.

Oddly, unlike the Lincoln-Way Central game, the Morton-U High contest was close deep into the fourth quarter – and yet I never thought the Potters could lose. Though weary after playing at Metamora the night before and Lincoln-Way Central this morning, the Potters led U High, 33-23, late in the third quarter. The rest of the way, U High could get no nearer than four points – and lost to Morton for the second time in three weeks, the first defeat coming 42-39 in double-overtime at the State Farm Holiday Classic.

Josi Becker led Morton’s scoring against U High with 10. Shurman and Caylie Jones had 8 each, Bisping and Dowell 6 each, Courtney Jones 5, Maddy Becker 3, and Dullard 2.

The two games Saturday, by the way, were the openers of Galesburg’s Martin Luther King tournament which the Potters have won six years in a row, losing only one of 30 games. Monday, they go to Galesburg to play the hosts.

One thing more on Becker’s 400….

An assistant coach, Megan Hasler, asked if I would contribute a thought on the historic occasion. I had no thoughts. But I did have some numbers. I sent her “Bob Becker by the Numbers.” Here it is….

1. That time in Pekin when he said, “We kicked the living crud out of them.”
2. Pairs of pants split while coaching enthusiastically.
3. Games he was T’d up for removing his suit jacket enthusiastically.
7. Victories in a row over Galesburg.
43. Championships in Mid-Illini, Thanksgiving, MLK, regional, sectional, supersectional, state.
57. A narrow victory over East Peoria.
112, give or take a hundred: Times during a game when he shouts, “REBOUND!”
199. Victories I’ve seen.
201. Victories he managed before I arrived.
400. Midnights when Evelyn said, “No, we are not watching one more coaching video.”