Forts of our labor: Oakland’s rise

“Jalen Cone wrapped up, Fort for the win … GOT IT! And the one seed is one and done!”

That was Tony Parks’ ESPN+ call of Oakland Fort’s stunning 38-foot game-winner over Eastern Washington on March 5th.

The true freshman guard’s shot will go down as a career highlight, but it is only the beginning of his ascendance to become a Lumberjack household name.

To get to the shot, Fort and the entire team had to put in the work to get themselves within striking distance of the Eagles. Eastern Washington led by five points with less than one minute to go, in a prime position to take fouls and essentially end the game.

The Lumberjacks did not back down and played their hearts out. With just a touch of luck and some defensive stops, there were eight seconds left and barely enough time to take one more shot.

Queue Fort.

In a state of pure ecstasy, the entire bench swarmed him and he celebrated as if he was shivering, alluding to the “cold” shot he had just sunk.

In the locker room, his mentor, junior guard Cone, embraced him in a hug of brotherly love.

The rise

To see the development of Fort, we have to go all the way back to his sophomore year at Sunnyslope High School, or the beginning of his relationship with NAU Head Coach Shane Burcar.

“Oakland has been the longest courtship of my life, two and a half years,” Burcar said. “I offered him as a sophomore, as an interim [coach]. I say with Oak, he’s opened up Interstate 17, the highway between Flagstaff and Phoenix.”

This is to say that recruiting in Arizona has opened up after the Lumberjacks were able to snag Fort.

Fort improved every year of high school. He brought his point-per-game average from eight in his freshman year to 17 by the end of his senior year. His team improved every year as well, going from a 13-5 record his freshman year to an undefeated 16-0 season in his last.

Rome was not built in a day, and neither was Fort’s success. All the team’s work in the offseason began with Burcar’s ideology of getting the team together first and then focusing on game-time preparation.

It helped that the team bought into Burcar’s ideology, because only then could they truly lock in.

“We work on our game-winning situations, or ‘winning time,’ in June and July when we have our eight weeks, but we didn’t do that this year,” Burcar said. “We just wanted to build the team chemistry and get them comfortable for August.”

The team looked comfortable and locked in come tournament time.

Oakland, in particular, was a big name Burcar touted at the beginning of the season, alongside other new team members — like Xavier Fuller, a transfer graduate student guard, and sophomore Trent McLaughlin — and fellow freshman forward Jack Wistrcill.

Burcar wanted Fort to thrive in the NAU system, and conveniently, there was already a guard of similar stature and frame to act as a mentor. That would be Cone, who is only an inch taller than the 5’10 Fort.

It helps that Cone is also the focal point of the NAU offense as its star player: So many of the plays are already based around a shorter guard. As a team leader, Cone said he was excited for the opportunity to coach a teammate to succeed.

“Being able to take him under my wing and help me out a bit, I think he’s going to have a big year for us,” Cone said in a season preview.

He was absolutely correct, although it took a while to see Fort’s immediate impact.

In the first game of the season against Big Ten school Michigan State, Fort only posted one point and one rebound, but the potential was there. He showed flashes of being able to attack the glass and the paint.

He only played six minutes in the Lumberjacks’ next game against ASU, but he scored two points this time. Things were looking up.

In the third game, he broke double-digit scoring — 12 points, to be exact — in a fourpoint loss to the Utah Valley Wolverines.

His breakout game came against NAIA school Benedictine Mesa, where he dropped a career-high 15 points. This total was only matched by the playoff performance against Eastern Washington. Each game he played led to more growth, another topic that Burcar talked about all season.

“He’s been consistent all year, and sometimes the stats don’t reflect that,” Burcar said. “I think Oakland has built that confidence to make big shots all season long.”

For the rest of the season, Fort continued to be a backup rotational piece, averaging five points per game. However, things changed drastically as the postseason loomed.

His teammates saw his “arrival” coming from a mile away.

“Oak works hard too,” Fuller said. “That three wasn’t lucky.”

The arrival

The learning and training Fort did in the regular season came to fruition at the exact time the Lumberjacks needed him to step up.

NAU came into the Big Sky Conference basketball tournament as the No. 9 seed, the second lowest in the tournament. As such, the Lumberjacks had to go through the No. 10-seeded Idaho Vandals, who fired its head coach right after the end of the regular season.

The Vandals only won two of its last 11 games to end the season and were on a fourgame losing streak coming into the tournament, which boded well for the NAU squad that was on the losing side of luck most of the season.

The Lumberjacks had five players, including Fort, score in double figures en route to the 87-76 win. Fort set a season-high for three-pointers made in a game with three and scored a total of 13 points off the bench.

Idaho’s Interim Head Coach Tim Marrion said he was surprised with the way Fort shot the ball, so much so that it interrupted his defensive game plan.

“I think he had hit four threes in conference play, and we go on synergy, we look at the numbers, and he was 2-12 from three on the season off the bounce,” Marrion said. “And wouldn’t you know it, we go under and bang bang bang, three threes?”

Fort shot 5-6 from the field in only 14 minutes and proved he could be a dangerous offensive option.

After booting the Vandals out of the playoffs, NAU was faced with a much taller task, the No. 1-seeded Eastern Washington Eagles. Simply put, the Eagles dominated the Big Sky regular season, going 16-2 behind the hot hand of senior guard Steele Venters.

The Lumberjacks were not fazed by the prowess of the Eagles; and behind yet another stellar shooting performance by Fort, the team hung on until the very end.

It was then that the “play” happened.

Eastern Washington had the clamps on Cone all game long and forced him to take bad shots. He was double-teamed on the last play of the game and had to move the ball somewhere to avoid NAU’s second straight tournament loss to the Eagles.

One quick flip and Fort changed the Lumberjack’s season trajectory.

He played only 14 minutes, yet again, but went 6-8 from the field with a career-high 15 points.

As for the shot, Fort said he had no doubt he could make it.

“I’ve been consistent with my work, and I’ve been consistent every day, along with my other teammates, so I just feel like consistency is the biggest thing and it’s coming to fruition at the right time,” Fort said.

All the hard work and strife NAU dealt with this season climaxed in the Eastern Washington game, but the job did not end there; there were still two more games to be played.

They ended up being against the “Montana Gauntlet,” Montana and Montana State, in back-to-back games.

Fort had very little impact in the win against the Grizzlies, only putting up two points. In the championship game, however, he added 14 points in a playoff-high with 17 minutes of playtime.

Fort’s scoring ability will have to be even more prominent next season due to the departures of Cone, who entered the transfer portal in late March, and Fuller, who graduates this spring.

Based on this late-season turnaround, Fort has the capability to establish himself as a star NAU guard, and the assistance of Carson Towt will factor a lot into Fort’s growth.