By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
It all depends on how you look at it. If you focus on the first six minutes of the featured Sunday Griffin Elite Basketball Classic game between a young Covington Catholic team and national power La Lumiere School out of LaPorte, Ind., it was the biggest walkover imaginable.
La Lumiere 19, CovCath 0. Zero. Not a point for the overmatched Colonels in the first six minutes.
However, if you look at the rest of the first half, it was CovCath 29, La Lumiere 19.
Or the final 26 minutes of the game after the shock of playing an all-star team with players being recruited by the likes of Kansas, Duke, UCLA, Michigan, Indiana, Michigan State, Missouri, Notre Dame, Alabama, West Virginia, Cincinnati, Oregon and Villanova, it was CovCath 60, La Lumiere 55.
CovCath will look at it that way. Throw away those first six minutes of La Lumiere’s 74-60 win.
“No way you can replicate that in practice,” CovCath Coach Scott Ruthsatz said of the athletes, the talent, the size, the quickness and the skill sets that La Lumiere, a Catholic boarding and day school an hour east of Chicago and five minutes from Leke Michigan, brings to the game.
“In a game like that, all you can do is compete,” Ruthsatz said, even if it takes you six minutes to get there. “You have to compete. This is why you play a game like this.”You find out who has the will to compete, even if it takes those six minutes.
“I think it’s something I definitely need,” said CovCath’s lone player with size, 6-9 senior transfer Caden Miller, who was up against his second seven-footer of the season, Steve Solano, and his 6-9 backup, Jonas Munya. “I think this will definitely help me in the long run.”
And help the Colonels. “We have three sophomores out there,” Ruthsatz said of his perimeter trio of Athens McGillis, footballer Cash Harney and Nolan Ruthsatz, the coach’s son. “This is part of their maturational period.”
For a while, it looked like a JV squad going against an NBA team. CovCath was definitely going against players you’ll be seeing on TV next year in big games like 6-5 guard Darius Adams, whose game-high 25 points included a radar-guided six of eight from three-point range. “Our guys look a little different,” Ruthsatz said of his sub-6-foot trio compared to Adams who will be playing at Kansas or Villanova, maybe Michigan or Notre Dame next year.
“Having a scouting report on somebody like that doesn’t really help,” Ruthsatz said. Not until you see him and then you just have to go out there and start competing against guys like that.
“It’s fun playing against big teams,” the Colonels’ other senior, sharpshooter Brady Hussey said, after equaling Miller’s 14 points to lead CovCath. “I love playing in games like that. The start wasn’t too good but the last three quarters we outscored them. You just gotta’ go out there and play. But you also “gotta’ start in control. And not just look for good shots but great shots.”
Like the left-handed Miller did in the middle of all that size defending him. “I think I went with my right more than my left.” And while Miller said “You gotta’ be more physical” when you run up against big guys who “I kinda’ let push me around a lot” to start, that’s not how it ended.
With his quickness – “I’ve put in a lot of work on my footwork,” Miller says — the Lakers sat their big guys and went with a smaller lineup – three 6-5 guys and a 6-4 and 6-2 – to stay with the Colonels who had a chance to get the lead into single digits, down 45-35 on a 9-2 run before missing a pair of free throws and watching La Lumiere hit a quick three for a five-point swing.
“We’ve got to run better sets,” Ruthsatz said, “but we’ve only had the football guys (Harney, Donovan Bradshaw and Noah Johnson) for a couple of weeks. Maybe next week in Florida (at The Villages Charter tournament).” The trio combined for 15 points in 50 minutes of play with Harney starting and scoring 10.
They’re also going to have to figure out how to rebound better with essentially a four-guard lineup that was outrebounded, 40-17, by the bigger Lakers. The ball-hawking, quick-handed Colonels made up for that a bit, forcing 20 La Lumiere turnovers to 13 of their own.
For La Lumiere (it means “the lights” in Latin referring, we’re told, to the lights from nearby Lake Michigan), 6-4 guard Jerry Easter followed Adams with 16. Catch him next year at Baylor or UCLA, Alabama or Ohio State, maybe even Cincinnati.
As for CovCath, catch the Colonels in February or March, they say, when they aim to compete with all the talent the Ninth Region will bring from the likes of Newport and Cooper, who also learned a thing or two about competing at the Griffin Elite Basketball Classic.
SCORE BY QUARTERS
COVINGTON CATHOLIC 7 22 12 19—60
LA LUMIERE 24 14 22 14—74
COVCATH (6-2): McGillis 3 2 0 8, Harney 5 0 0 10, Miller 6 0 2 14, Stewart 0 0 0 0, Johnson 2 1 0 5, Bradshaw 0 0 0 0, Hussey 5 3 1 14, 4 1 0 9, TOTALS: 25-54, 7-17, 3-7, 60.
LA LUMIERE: Easter 8 0 0 16, Bell 6 0 0 12, Adams 9 6 1 25, Murray 0 0 0 1, Buckner 4 1 2 11, Munya 0 0 0 0, Solano 3 0 3 9, TOTALS: 30-56, 7-12, 7-11, 74.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.
