By Dan Weber NKyTribune sports reporter
GEORGETOWN – Sometimes it’s not whether you win or lose but what you take away from the game.
Hard-earned lessons may be the best ones, Covington Catholic’s young Colonels — the Ninth Region’s No. 2 basketball preseason pick – had to be telling themselves as the season debut opponent Thursday night for a Great Crossing team that half of the six rating services say is No. 1 in Kentucky.
The Warhawks certainly look the part with a front line of 6-foot-6, 6-foot-7 and 7-foot-1. That’s right, junior center Malachi Moreno has grown a couple of inches since last year. And while he’s the national name everyone knows, he’s something of a back-bencher on this team.
But he does allow his teammates to come far out on the floor, double-team the ball and not worry about getting beat. “He just blocks every shot at the basket,” said CovCath Coach Scott Ruthsatz.
Maybe not every shot but he did block five and made life really difficult for CovCath’s 6-9 Caden Miller, the senior transfer from Arkansas, who was up against that big front line almost all by himself, it seemed.
Moreno, who has 34 scholarship offers from the likes of Kentucky, Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, Cincinnati, Notre Dame, Michigan and USC, among others, had plenty of help.
Start with 6-6, 220-pound junior Vince Dawson, who as Ruthhatz says, “has the total package. He’s tremendously improved.” As in he can shoot it, he can shoot threes, he can handle it, he can rebound it and do pretty much whatever the Warhawks needed him to on the way to 17 points.
But he wasn’t the player most difficult to handle for a thin Colonel team that had five of its 17 varsity players back home on this night getting ready for Friday night’s Class 4A state football championship game against Boyle County.
Five-foot-9 point guard Junis Burrell was, hitting three three-pointers and all six of his free throws for a game-high 21 points in Great Crossing’s 66-51 win over the 2-1 Colonels. On his 20th points, Burrell reached the 1,000-point mark for his career.
Of the Colonel football players not here, at least one of them – sophomore point guard/safety Cash Harney would have matched up with Burell as well as given CovCath a physicality against the body-up Warhawk defenders the Colonels don’t have right now.
And at least three others will provide size and athleticism inside for a CovCath team that needed help for Miller, who along with his teammates, learned some tough lessons in a first half clearly disrupted by a laissez-fair officiating trio who allowed contact by the home team that would have drawn a yellow card in soccer or a penalty in hockey go un-called.
Which is how CovCath found itself trailing, 35-18, and in something of a state of shock at halftime. Three times Miller missed point-blank at the rim. And returning sophomore starter Athens McGillis missed seven of his eight shots from the floor the first two quarters.
Only senior sharpshooter Brady Hussey handled the first 16 minutes well for CovCath, scoring 10 of his team-high 15 points before intermission.
“With a young team like we have, you have to learn from a game like this, to see how it’s being officiated,” said Ruthsatz. And that seems to be what his Colonels did, winning the second half, in a game where the starters played all but the final minute, 33-31.
“We’ll take it,” Ruthsatz said. And then go home “and watch the film.” And wait for the football guys to get back and try to take this game with them “into late February and early March.”
When it counts, Ruthsatz said. Although it’s clear Great Crossing, from suburban Georgetown, isn’t going away any time soon. Moreno (10 points, 10 rebounds, five blocks), Dawson, Burrell and 6-4 guard Gage Richardson (10 points), are all juniors. “They’ll be around quite a while,” Ruthsatz said.
But based on their second half, even without the football guys, so will CovCath. Miller simply refused to back off from Moreno & Co. even though he’s not used to giving up four inches to the guy guarding him. Miller finished with a double-double – 11 points and 10 rebounds. And McGillis added a dozen with a couple of three-pointers.
At the end of a 10-minute postgame debriefing, a cheer came out of the CovCath locker room. “Was it anything you said?” Ruthsatz was asked. He didn’t think so.
“I think they were just happy to get out of here.”
SCORE BY QUARTERS
Covington Catholic 9 9 9 24 – 51
Great Crossing 20 15 14 17 – 66
BOX SCORE
COVCATH: McGillis 5-3-2-0-12; Miller 5-5-0-1-11; Stewart 0-0-0-0-0; Wermuth 0-0-0-0-0; Hussey 5-2-3-2-15: Carroll 2-0-2-0-6; Schreiber 0-0-0-0-0; N. Ruthsatz 3-3-0-1-7; Lanham 0-0-0-0-0; TOTALS: 20-53 13-32 7-31 4-11 51.
GREAT CROSSING: Holman 2-2-0-0-4; Dawson 8-7-1-0-17; Warren 1-1-0-0-2; Cooper 0-0-0-0-0; Burell 6-3-3-6-21; Richardson 4-3-1-1-10, Martin 0-0-0-0-0; Koonce 0-0-0-0-0; Godfrey 1-1-0-0-2; Moreno 5-5-0-0-10; Orem 0-0-0-0-0; TOTALS: 27-55 22-42 5-13 7-7 66.