BROOMFIELD — Nick Tomsick has a flair for the dramatic.
It doesn’t matter where he goes or whom he is playing for — the former Broomfield standout just hits big shots.
He left Broomfield after his junior year and has taken quite the circuitous route to Durango and Fort Lewis College, but he has found a home with coach Bob Hofman and the Skyhawks. A natural scorer, Tomsick is averaging over 22 points per game this season for Fort Lewis and hopes to parlay his success into a professional basketball career.
“He’s done a great job for us. We have a lot of new guys we are trying to fit in, but he’s been a prolific scorer and been a great teammate,” said Hofman, whose team is off to a 5-2 start. “I couldn’t ask for more from him.”
After he left Broomfield, Tomsick and his family moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., for his senior season, where he played for his third coach in four varsity seasons — Broomfield’s Kevin Boley and Terrence Dunn were the other two — and took Chaparral High School to within one point of the Class 5A Arizona title.
With college on the horizon, Tomsick admitted that he probably got lost in the shuffle when he moved and had he stayed at Broomfield, “It may have worked out better and maybe I wouldn’t have gotten lost in the mix by jumping around.”
With things not lining up the way he would have preferred, Tomsick went the junior college direction and landed at North Platte Community College and playing for coach Kevin O’Connor. In his two seasons playing for the Knights, Tomsick compiled 956 career points, averaged 22.3 points per game as a sophomore and was an all-conference first team selection.
“He played for a very task-oriented coach and it really kind of helped him develop,” said Hofman, who won a Class 4A Colorado state title in 1981 at Fairview. “He was already tough enough and skilled.”
Pretty soon, coaches started the recruiting process again and no one did a better job than Hofman’s assistant Bob Pietrack, who never took the sharpshooter off his radar after he came out of high school.
“I went the junior college route because I didn’t have exactly what I wanted coming out of high school,” Tomsick said. “During my sophomore season I started getting a lot of interest from a lot of Division II stuff and some small Division 1 things, but I really wanted to go to a place where I really enjoyed the coaching staff and where I thought I was really going to have a big part of it.
“Coach Pietrack probably did the best job recruiting me and was one of the best recruiters of all the people recruiting me and just made me feel at home.”
Since getting to Durango, Tomsick has fit right in and his get-off-the bus range has been on display to the tune of 14.6 points per game in his first season and that has skyrocketed to over 22 this season. That aforementioned flair for the dramatic has come in the form of three buzzer-beating shots that have either sent the game into overtime or won them.
“Those are pretty cool,” he said, “I like those.”
The Skyhawks are considered a team to be reckoned with in the RMAC. Hofman, like every coach at every level, would like a little more balanced scoring from his team, but also knows what he has in his talented shooting guard.
“He’s just a basketball player. In general, we would like to have a little more balance in our scoring and we still need to develop that, but Nick’s range is beyond belief,” Hofman said. “Sometimes when he is rhythm, he’ll pull up and shoot beyond NBA three-range and it is just as smooth as it can be. You have to let shooters shoot and his shot selection in general has been terrific.
“As a coach, you don’t want to have to rein in a great shooter, but at the same time you have to accept a few shots that maybe you think aren’t the best.”
Tomsick received is Associate of Arts degree at North Platte and will graduate from Fort Lewis in the spring with a degree in business administration. With after-college plans still up in the air, Tomsick would love nothing more than to continue playing the game.
“I don’t really have a complete set plan. I would really like to play, so I am going to wait and see, just see how the rest of the year goes, how our team does and winning will of course help,” he said. “But if I could, I would definitely like to keep playing. I would prefer to go play in Italy or in Europe, but that is a long way away.”
Follow Jon on Twitter at twitter.com/JonEYunt
