By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
That Covington Catholic had a shot at the buzzer to tie Cooper and get this game into overtime was hard to explain.
Just as when we tell you Cooper’s 57-54 semifinal win Sunday in the boys’ Ninth Region tournament was no upset.
What was an upset was that this CovCath team won 27 games against its typically tough schedule with almost no size.
Here’s all you need to know. Cooper’s 18-12 Jaguars, champions of the 33rd District, had lost a pair of “bigs” this season – 6-foot-8 Caleb Brooks after six games to a knee injury and 6-6 Shaun Pouncy, also to a knee injury Wednesday in a quarterfinal overtime win against Highlands.
And still, the Jaguars, man to man, towered over the Colonels, with no one taller than 6-3, by a couple of inches per man.
And then Cooper got a jump-start from mercurial point guard Yamil Rondon, who seemed on a mission to out-Evan Ipsaro, the Colonels’ all-state guard who has carried his team all season.
“We can’t start out like that, get down 12-2,” said Ipsaro, who is heading to Miami of Ohio next year. “Credit us for coming back.”
But credit Cooper for figuring out what it had to do to survive the loss of Brooks and Pouncy. Coach Tim Sullivan credits it to their “scar tissue” after all the injuries and requirements to find a way. “So many scars,” Sullivan said.
Which required that they find a new way, Sullivan said. “We’ve really challenged them. And they challenged me. I had to be better.”
And no, there was no dramatic turnaround this season, just steady progress for a team that found togetherness. “Our leaders just stepped up,” Sullivan said of 6-5 seniors Gavin Lutz and Trevor Ollier, who split 10 points and 10 rebounds between them. But it wasn’t about their scoring, it was about their leadership. “It was fun watching them step up.”
But no one was more fun to watch than Rondon, the dynamic guard who went on a 9-0 run to help the Jags to a 15-4 lead, only to have CovCath hit a pair of threes to close it to 15-10 at the end of one.
“It takes a lot out of you to get back into it,” CovCath Coach Scott Ruthsatz said in this battle of coaches who took three teams to the state championship game between them in the last decade, with Ruthsatz winning his in 2014 and 2018, “a lot of energy.”
And in the end, the smallish Colonels, defending regional champs but having lost their 6-8 and 6-6 “bigs” from a year ago often lining up five guards, didn’t have enough. They’d managed to beat Cooper in overtime in the regular season, 78-69, during a four-game losing streak that also saw Newport beat them, 44-42, Feb. 9.
Rondon was the early difference here, for sure. “People ask me about him all the time,” Sullivan said. “He drives me crazy. The first time we played CovCath, he tried to do too much.”
Not this time. He didn’t try to do too much, he just did it. “It doesn’t surprise me that he did this,” Sullivan said of Rondon’s team-high 16 points with five assists and two steals.
As for going against Ipsaro, “I do look up to him,” Rondon said. As he should. By himself, Ipsaro almost willed the Colonels back into this one from down nine, 49-40, with less than two minutes left with a couple of steals, six points and help from quick threes by Ayden Link, who added 12 points off the bench, and Brady Hussey, who added 10.
Ipsaro’s final score made it 56-54 with 8.4 seconds left and Cooper’s Andy Johnson, a 6-3 sophomore who finished with 13 points, on the line for two with 4.4 seconds left.
A miss on the second shot had the ball in Ipsaro’s hands as he headed to midcourt, found long-range shooter Hussey on the left perimeter for a possible game-tying three at the buzzer. It was just short.
“That was the right play,” Ruthsatz said.
But it was Cooper doing the celebrating, joining their region-winning girls in the championship game.
Yamil explained it: “It’s a game of energy. Nobody’s here, nobody’s there, we’re all connected.”
He had another thought. “As I go, we go.”
Not a brag if it’s true, as it was on just one Yamil drive to the basket when not once but twice did he dribble the ball behind his back under intense pressure from a CovCath defender. Only the second time he’s ever done that, he said. The other time? The first CovCath game.
With the sophomore pair of Rondon and Johnson going against Newport’s young guys, Tuesday will offer a terrific underclass matchup.
Each coach came up with the same word to describe Cooper’s play here. “Efficient,” Sullivan and Ruthsatz concluded.
Asked how many shots his team took, Sullivan was told a mere “34.”
“Thirty-four shots?” Sullivan repeated the number compared to CovCath’s 48. “If you take 34, you better hit ‘em. How many did we hit?”
That would be 20 (a sizzling 58.8 percent). Ruthsatz read down the Cooper stat sheet. “Five for 10, one for two, three for three, six for 11, three for six, one for one and one for one . . . that’s efficient.”
“It’s been fun watching them step up,” Sullivan said, especially against “a CovCath team that’s been whipping our butts.”
As for Ruthsatz, he was asked how this tiny CovCath team won 27 games and stayed on top of the Ninth Region and in the top five in the state all year. First, the easy answer. “Evan Ipsaro,” whose game-high 21 points came on came on nine-of-16 shooting, mostly explosive drives through Cooper’s taller defenders, with four rebounds and four assists.
But then there was this. In his 12 years at CovCath, for him and his Colonels’ staff, this was “by far my second-best coaching job,” as he named each of his five assistants for share in the credit. “We squeezed the most out of the potential of this team.”
But Ruthsatz had special praise for the Cooper player he and Ipsaro called simply “Zero,” – his number, for Nmandi Ajaezu, a senior who was cut a year ago and worked his way back to a starting role where he scored 13 points, grabbed four rebounds and had the task of guarding Ipsaro.
BOX SCORE
COOPER 15 15 11 16—57
COVINGTON CATHOLIC 10 10 12 22-54
COOPER (18-12): Ajaezu 13, Ollier 3, Johnson 13, ROndon 16, lutz 7, Schilling 2, Brown 3, Murphy 0, TOTAL: 57.
COVINGTON CATHOLIC (27-7): Jones 3, Ipsaro 21, A. McGillis 0, K. McGillis 4, Hussey 10, Link 12, Johnson 4, Ruthsatz 0, TOTAL: 54.