And then there were two teams left in the Ninth Region Boys Basketball Tournament. Both Colonels. Both located on the Dixie Highway in Kenton County. And both familiar with one another. They played the first week of the season, a 79-59 Covington Catholic win over a visiting Dixie Heights team.
And now they face one another in the last game of the season here.
You could almost feel the collective sigh of relief, satisfaction, or whatever you want to call it, as the CovCath players and coaches exited the Colonels’ locker room at BB&T Arena after dispatching Lloyd Memorial in the Ninth Region Boys Basketball semifinals. That’s what it’s supposed to look like seemed to be the general sentiment after a 71-52 win Sunday over a dangerous Lloyd team.
CovCath, 27-4 now, played “with confidence,” Coach Scott Ruthsatz said as his program reached the Ninth Region championship game for the ninth time in 11 years. For a Lloyd program that Mike Walker is building in Erlanger, this was all new. But after their first regional win in a decade Saturday, no wonder their fans saluted the Juggernauts, who finished 22-8, as they left the court – and the Juggs returned the favor to their fans.
CovCath, meanwhile, wasn’t taking bows after this one. They have another game that matters more at 7 p.m. Tuesday after Dixie Heights downed Holy Cross, 65-57, in the other semifinal.
But the kind of in-region romp didn’t look it was going to happen against a Lloyd team with the size and physicality to challenge CovCath much as Cooper did Saturday in a 49-37 loss. This young CovCath team starts four underclassmen along with 6-foot-8 senior Mitchell Rylee, who often found himself staring at three defenders crowding him as CovCath was staring at another early deficit, down 13-12, after one period.
Early shooting woes, just five of 13 from the field while missing half their four free throws, were plaguing the Colonels again.
“Mitchell got us together,” junior point guard Evan Ipsaro said after his game-high 20 points and one spectacular runout after another as he willed the Colonels back on top.
“Coach puts a whole lot of trust in me,” Ipsaro said of his ability to take over the game when the Colonels needed him to. But this wasn’t on him, he said.
Credit Rylee’s three breakaway dunks off turnovers – and the reaction of the “Colonel Crazies” cheering section in the third quarter — for getting this going in their direction. “We feed off the crowd,” Ipsaro said. “We all feed off them. We need people behind our backs.”
“That’s why we play the schedule we do,” Ruthsatz said. “I go back to our schedule. That’s how you get your young guys confident, playing the teams we play and showing them they can do it.”
One of those was not Lloyd. “But we didn’t boycott them,” Walker said. “We’ll play them next year. We just couldn’t work out a date.”
As to whether that would help, Walker doesn’t think so. “We got gassed in that third quarter.” After hanging in there down seven, 34-27 at the half, Lloyd found itself looking down the barrel of those Rylee dunks in the third period. And he lost the handle on a possible fourth. “I always try to throw them down,” he said.
“We let Cooper dictate the pace of the game Saturday, Ruthsatz said. But not Sunday. CovCath’s seven steals and Lloyd’s 16 turnovers did.
So did the unsung man at times in the CovCath lineup — 6-6, 230-pound junior Chandler Starks. “He guards multiple positions for us,” Ruthsatz said, “three different positions. He’s been the MVP on our defense. I told him ‘You’re the guy who keeps us together on defense’.”
Starks’ offense wasn’t half-bad with 11 points – one of five Colonels in double figures – in addition to six rebounds and four assists against just one turnover. He also had two steals and a block in his 23 minutes.
Mekhi Wilson, off the bench, added 12 with perfect five-for-five shooting. Rylee and Brady Hussey each had 10 points while Rylee added eight rebounds as the Colonels out-scrapped the Juggs, 32-18, on the boards.
And no, the Cooper pattern would not repeat. With just under three minutes left in the third period, thanks to the work of Ipsaro and Rylee, CovCath was up 20 – 47-27. Lloyd senior shooter Ryan Davis, with his 16 points – and three three-pointers — did his best. But no other Jugg reached double digits, even though 6-5 re-classified junior guard Jeremiah Israel had the game’s highlight play with a dunk in traffic on his way to eight points.
This would not be a game that Lloyd would win from outside, even though they still managed to hit on seven of 14 from long range. “You gotta’ play with high hands,” Ruthsatz said of the word to his defense. “Those threes will kill you.”
Actually, in this one, the three Rylee dunks in the third pretty much were fatal. Only it was Lloyd the victim.
Don’t feel sorry for the Juggs, said Walker, a Dayton, Ohio, native who came to Northern Kentucky to play basketball at NKU before knee injuries ended his career. He’ll have to rebuild a bit but will have Israel and his son, EJ, a 6-7 freshman, to build on.
“It’s a community thing,” and something he’s very proud of, Walker said of the basketball building at Lloyd. “All 13 of our players are from Erlanger. I’d rather have that, that sense of community, than a state championship.”
CovCath is going for a state championship, no doubt about that. The private school Colonels may be young, and come from lots of different places, but that’s why they challenge them, Ipsaro said. “The coaches get on us, but they care for us,” he said.
They challenge them, Ruthsatz says, so that when the time comes, like when they’re trailing for a second straight regional tourney game to a Ninth Region team after winning games in the region by an average 35.4 points, they will have what it takes to play through it.
As they did Sunday.
