By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
If Thursday’s 59-56 squeaker win over Miami-Hamilton at the Connor Convocation Center is any indicator, it’s going to be an interesting year for Thomas More’s new-look or maybe same-old Saints.
The band is better than ever, the dance team great as always and the new scoreboard/videoboard, state of the art.
But how about this team?
In completing its “Beat the Branches” home trifecta with wins over Kent State-Tuscarawas, UC-Clermont and Miami-Hamilton to open the season, the now 3-1 Saints didn’t make things much clearer for seventh-year coach Ray, who took TMU to the NAIA Final Four three seasons ago, to the NAIA’s second round two seasons ago and the championship game of their new Great Midwest Athletic Conference in the NCAA’s Division II last year.
Where this team is going is not on Mapquest, not yet. Will anyone step up to lead the way Ryan Batte, the best NAIA player in the nation, did three years ago? Or will there be anyone to step in for Reid Jolly, whose five seasons and 144 games made him a Crestview Hills fixture?
Ray is determined to find out, the way he did down the stretch of a game that was tied six times although it never should have been that close. “I probably could have called a timeout,” Ray told his guys, “but I’m not helping you out.”
He told them something else down the stretch in one of the timeouts. “We went zone,” Ray said. “The guys didn’t want to. I told ‘em I didn’t care.”
Did they get his message? “They got a lot of messages downstairs,” Ray said of his postgame locker room talk, before heading up to the postgame press conference.
Here are some of Ray’s messages: “Don’t worry about winning, just compete . . . we can say we’re young and inexperienced all year (that’s no excuse) . . . we were much better playing downhill . . . the best way to get a team out of a zone is to shoot ‘em out of it . . . I’m proud of this team, they made some tough plays at the end.”
With the game clock and the shot clock ticking down together with 22 seconds left and neither team having scored in nearly three minutes, Miami-Hamilton came out of a timeout with the ball, down 57-56, and a chance to win it at the buzzer.
Which when three TMU defenders took it away on a drive to the basket, came up with the ball with first-year starter Ryan Paris also getting the foul before hitting a pair of free throws with 1.6 seconds left for the final margin.
“A win’s a win,” Ray said. “It’s not always going to be pretty,” said senior guard Wyatt Vieth, “we just gutted that out.” The 6-foot-3 Vieth, the former St. Henry star, had no other choice. Hitting just one of 10 from three-point range, the career 35.0 percent shooter from three with 165 made in his TMU career, led the Saints in rebounding with a game-high nine.
Even then, TMU found itself outrebounded by the smaller Harriers, 33-30. But not all the stats were negative: TMU had a 19-0 edge in fast break points and a 24-12 edge in points off turnovers with the Saints limiting their turnovers to eight while forcing 20 from Miami-Hamilton.
Even with their shooting having gone South in the second half with one for 14 from three-point range (7.1 percent) and eight of 30 from the field (26.7 percent), the Saints managed to break a 37-37 halftime tie with a 22-19 edge the second half. And they did it without fouling, sending the Harriers to the line just six times (they made five). TMU was 12 of 15 for the game-winning edge.
“We couldn’t throw it in the ocean against their zone,” Ray said of the obvious field goal shooting issues. But they cut down Miami-Hamilton’s 50 percent (six of 12) long range shooting before intermission to 27.3 percent (three of 11) after. And that was enough.
“That’s on us,” senior guard Casey George, with Vieth, one of the Saints who made that Final Four trip as freshmen. The good and the bad.
“We make half our shots and we’ll be fine,” said the 6-foot George, built like a college tailback. George did just that, hitting seven of 14 from the field for a game-high 17 points.
He and Vieth, the lone seniors on this team, have another job – showing the young guys the way. With five of the Saints who hit the floor Thursday having moved up from the bench after playing mostly in practice last season, it’s a big job.
“It’s a big role, you gotta’ help those guys out,” George said. “Sometimes it’s uncomfortable,” Vieth said, “but you gotta’ get on ‘em. It’s a lot more difficult when Coach has to do a lot of policing.”
On a night when the Saints didn’t get a great deal of offense from their 6-8, 6-9 and 6-7 guys and, at times, played five guards, two of them joined George in double figures – Kai Simpson, a 6-3 redshirt freshman out of Lexington Frederick Douglass scored 11 points with Paris, a 6-5 junior from Hilliard, Ohio, scoring 10 with a pair of three-pointers.
But if the shooting isn’t there, one thing is, George says. “This is one of the closest teams we’ve had, we do everything together.”
Ray hopes that shooting it better is one of those things they do together. “Don’t focus on results,” Ray told them, “just keep getting good shots.”
As to having been picked to finish seventh in the GMAC this season, George says that’s not a motivator for this team and there’s no chip on the Saints’ shoulder. Just this.
“We don’t get into that stuff,” George says. “We just do what we do – play Thomas More basketball.”
What exactly that is will be determined in the next three-and-a-half months starting Tuesday in Frankfort at Kentucky State.
BOX SCORE
MIAMI-HAMILTON 37 19—56
THOMAS MORE 37 22—59
MIAMI-HAMILTON (0-2): Olden 2-6 1-4 3-3 8, Brashers 6-14 3-7 0-0 15, Davis 3-9 0-2 0-0 6, Watson 3-4 1-1 2-3 9, Keehan 3-7 2-6 0-0 8, Priah 2-3 2-2 0-0 6, Thompson 1-2 0-1 0-0 2, Norris 1-1 0-0 0-0 2; TOTALS: 21-46 9-23 5-6 56.
THOMAS MORE (3-1): Rylee 2-3 0-0 0-0 4, Paris 2-7 2-7 4-5 10, Simpson 5-11 0-1 1-1 11, Vieth 1-11 1-10 2-2 5, George 7-14 0-1 3-4 17, Browne 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, McClure 3-5 1-3 0-0 7, McClain 1-6 1-6 2-3 5, Johnson 0-1 0-0 0-0 0; TOTALS: 21-58 5-28 12-15 59.