North Jersey Male Athlete of the Week caps basketball career with 63-point game
Tarik Bicic is 6-foot-5 and wears jersey No. 1 for the Rutherford boys basketball team.
Yet, in the past week, he’s been hearing another number repeated around the halls of his school.
“People just come up to me and say, ‘63, 63’,” Bicic said. “It’s kind of funny.”
That’s one way to put it. Amazing would work too. So would eye-popping.
Bicic set a Bulldog record on Feb. 17, scoring 63 points in a non-conference home game against Shabazz. He admitted that the 4:30 p.m. Friday contest was not well-attended – though clearly, it did not take long for word of his achievement to circulate the school.
“It was our last game before states, and I remember just wanting to win,” he said. “In the first quarter, I only had nine points. And then, my teammates just started feeding me the ball down in the paint, and I just kept scoring.”
By halftime, Bicic was up to 34, so the Bulldogs kept getting him the ball to see how high he could take the total. Fellow senior Jon Michael Santiago set a personal best with 15 assists in the game.
To hear Bicic talk about the achievement made it sound more like a team record than an individual one.
“Yeah, 100 percent,” he said. “I couldn’t have done without my teammates.”
An extensive search of The Record archives returned a listing of Bergen County’s single-game high scorers from 1984. Ed Goldberg of Fort Lee sits atop the list with 73 points in a 1956 game, and no more recent evidence has been found of anybody topping Goldberg.
Bicic’s effort may be North Jersey’s most widely-publicized 60-point game since the early 2000s, when then-Paterson Catholic teammates Marquis Webb and Darryl Watkins each accomplished the feat in the same week.
Although Bicic is Rutherford’s tallest player, his primary role remains point guard.
“In middle school, I was used as a small forward,” he said. “But I just kept shooting and shooting, and I started working on my dribble, and everything just came together. So here, I’m a point guard – me and my coach [Jamie Parnofiello] agreed on it, because I’m like a Division II [prospect].”
The 1,000-point scorer is still in the process of finalizing his plans to play collegiately, but basketball has been his No. 1 sport since sixth grade, when he gave up soccer.
“I really like watching the NBA; I used to just go on the playground and do all the moves,” he said.
Bicic, whose family heritage is Montenegrin and Slovenian, has a younger sister who plays for the girls program at Rutherford. Although his team got upset in the first round of the state tournament, sophomore Taida Bicic’s basketball squad advanced.
And now that Tarik’s varsity career has ended, he’ll be the biggest Lady Bulldogs fan going forward.
“Oh yeah, 100 percent,” he said. “I’m going to go to all of her games.”
Tarik Bicic
Sport: Basketball
School: Rutherford
Class: Senior. Age: 17
Accomplishment: Bicic set a school single-game record when he scored 63 points in the Bulldogs’ 78-76 win over Shabazz. In two games, he averaged 41 points, 14.5 rebounds, 3 assists and 2 steals.
Also nominated: Preston Brown Jr. of Eastside and Niko Gomez of Paramus Catholic for basketball; Mateo Sgambellone of St. Joseph and Dean Costantino of Secaucus for wrestling; and Justin King of Bergen Catholic, Xavier Hayletts of Bergenfield, and Bryce Teto of Paramus for indoor track.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bergen Record Male Athlete of the Week: Tarik Bicic, Rutherford
