It was a day for Ninth Region royalty Sunday at the opening round of the Girls High School Basketball Tournament at NKU’s BB&T Arena. And a monstrous upset. And two mega-career achievements.
Notre Dame Academy’s Kes Murphy had not only brought Northern Kentucky its first-ever girls championship with his 2015 Holy Cross team but he’d had his 2022 Pandas firing on all cylinders, No. 3 in the state and unbeaten in nine regular season Ninth Region games they’d won by an average 34.7 points.
Then there was Ryle’s Katie Haitz, whose Lady Raiders won it all in 2019, a year when the former Boone County athlete was named Kentucky Coach of the Year. The person she beat out that year, runner-up Aaron Stamm, who had coached Conner to a 23-3 season, is now at Ludlow where the Hall of Fame Panther has his small school team here for the fourth straight year.
As for Newport Central Catholic, Ralph Meyer III, in his fourth season coaching the Lady Thoroughbreds, is following in the footsteps of his dad who devoted more than a half-century to coaching kids in Bellevue and at NewCath.
Although as we know so well, in high school sports the final say goes to the athletes, as it did Sunday.
NOTRE DAME-RYLE: NOT HOW YOU THOUGHT IT MIGHT GO
These two teams had played 12 days ago. And it wasn’t even close. Not close at all. Notre Dame won 63-34 in a 29-point romp. And here was Ryle, even if NewCath Coach Meyer thinks the Lady Raiders “have Top 10 talent in the state,” coming in off a 60-49 District 33 loss to Cooper. They weren’t exactly on a roll.
And here loomed NDA’s menacing Pandas. “We knew when we lost in the district we had a 33 percent chance of playing them,” Haitz said. “They’ve been talking about that reality.”
And junior scoring star Abby Holtman had been thinking about that game. Held to four points, her lowest scoring output of the season, Holtman admitted that “the first time we played was a bit in my head,” she said. But as it turned out, not at all in her play.
“My teammates,” she said. “That first game, they were more physical than we were.” But in this game, no one was more physical than Holtman whose 27 points and eight rebounds led everybody in a game where Ryle could have easily caved.
How about down 12, 38-26, late in the third period to a team that’s just whacked you? “Abby hit some big shots,” Haitz said. It’s what Ryle needed as they began a 25-6 run to the finish for most of the final period that saw Ryle the 53-51 winner that was closer than it appeared with NDA hitting a 30-footer at the buzzer.
“We haven’t always done that,” Haitz said of the way this team finished. “We’re getting better. It’s all the little things. We didn’t lose our composure.”
And that’s what was so puzzling for Murphy, as his senior-laden team did lose it a bit. It wasn’t about the first game romp, he said, but about getting his 23-3 NDA team to play for a region title for his veterans.
“It just wasn’t meant to be,” Murphy said. “It wasn’t our day. Ryle was the better team.”
Murphy continued: “It wasn’t about the Xs and O’s . . . we called timeouts. But our minds were tentative . . . when your shots aren’t going in . . . we lost our fight.”
That was the game plan, Haitz said. “They like to drive, make them do that with their weak hand and get up on (Noelle) Hubert, their shooter.” And when it counted most, the Lady Raiders (20-9) did just that.
“Sometimes we do it, sometimes we forget,” Haitz said. “We wanted to make this about us as a team, about getting better, about doing all the little things. And we didn’t lose our composure.”
One more thing: There were those shots Holtman made including four three-pointers and nine of 13 free throws.
The Pandas suffered the flip side of that: “When your shots aren’t going in there’s nothing you can do,” Murphy said as his Pandas went from bad – 10 of 29 for 34.5 percent in the first half to worse – eight of 27 for 29.6 percent the second half. NDA also got beat 37-26 on the boards negating the 12 turnover difference (17 to five) in favor of the Pandas’ full-court pressure. But even on the takeaways, they couldn’t convert. And now it’s Ryle that moves on to Wednesday’s first semifinal game tipping off at 6:30 against NewCath.
SHOOTING STARS FINISH 2 TIMES 2000
No surprise what happened in Game 2. When you have two of the state’s top nine scorers – NewCath’s No. 2 Rylee Turner (26.1 points a game) and Ludlow’s No. 9 Jenna Lillard (22.7) – you can expect things to heat up.
But could you expect a pair of mega-career accomplishments on the same night – in the same quarter – just minutes apart when a pair of friends went head-to-head?
Lillard couldn’t. “I thought I wasn’t going to get it,” Lillard said when they stopped the game to announce that she had reached the 2,000-point mark for her high school career. “I didn’t even know it until I broke it.”
And when she did, with 6:33 left in the game on another of her hard-work efforts inside, the player she considers “a friend,” and her AAU teammate, Turner, was sitting on the NewCath bench, saddled with four fouls that would make her miss nearly 11 minutes in NewCath’s 55-42 win.
“I knew I needed 26,” Turner said. “That was a lot of pressure.” Especially if you lose and there’s not another game. With another score, Lillard, who would finish with 23 points and 10 rebounds, had pulled Ludlow to within one, 37-36, with 5:20 left.
The Thomas More commit – she’s “6-feet tall in her shoes,” Lillard says – is excited about where she’s headed. The No. 3-in-the-nation Saints have it going now and in another year will be headed to the NCAA’s Division II Tournament. And staying here “will allow my best fan, my grandpa, to watch me play.” Not just any fan, Ralph Lillard, at 6-foot-7, was a terrific post player for the Panthers.
“We thought we had a shot,” Stamm said of his team that finishes 25-11, “but we just didn’t take enough advantage when Rylee was out of there.” One reason they could not: freshman point guard Caroline Eaglin, who stepped up and took over in the senior’s absence to score 19 points, hitting three three-pointers and grabbing six rebounds.
“I’ve got a team with me,” Turner said, “Caroline stepped up big time.”
“Rylee took her under her wing,” Meyer said, “and Caroline accepted it.”
But in the game’s final 4:30, Eaglin had plenty of help as Lillard scored again to make it 39-38 NewCath. By then, the 5-foot-10 Turner was back in the game. And scoring the way NewCath needed her to. She hit on a pair of drives, one she turned into a three-point play.
Then as NewCath had a more comfortable lead, Turner, who Meyer considers a Miss Basketball candidate, dribbled it out. And Ludlow had to foul. And Turner drilled 11 straight free throws. And on the second-to-last with barely 30 seconds left, the NewCath bench exploded in cheers. Turner may not have known exactly how many points she needed for 2000 as the game finished up, but her teammates did. She needed 26, she got 27.
“She’s a phenomenal player and a friend,” Lillard said. “She’s also a great person.”
As for the way this turned out: “If we’d have gotten together and planned that, we couldn’t have planned it better,” Lillard said with a big smile.
