By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
Contender? Or pretender?
That was the question for both teams going into Tuesday night’s District 34 seeding showdown between Lloyd Memorial’s 13-6 Juggernauts, 4-4 in their last eight games, and Dixie Heights’ streaking 12-3 Colonels, winners of eight straight.
Should be a good one, the near-capacity crowd at the Scheben Gym was anticipating. And it was.
If you like defense.
More particularly, a Juggernaut defense that held Dixie Heights to 18 points midway through the third quarter as the Juggs, with 45 points of their own, led by 27.
A game that Lloyd led, 18-16, at halftime was 36-18 at the end of the third period. Do the math. That’s an 18-2 third-quarter edge for a Lloyd team that smothered Dixie at one end, then slashed the Colonels apart at the other end with quick cuts for layups against the overplaying Dixie defense.
For 6:39 of that third quarter, Lloyd pitched a shutout until Dixie’s leading scorer, Griffen Derry, got through the defense for the lone field goal that quarter. As for Derry, who joined the 1,000-point Club last weekend and was averaging 18.0 points a game, that was one of his limited opportunities – just four field goals and nine points in a game where he got no shots in the first quarter.
“We watched a lot of film on him,” said senior Lloyd lefty Carter Bresser, who showed the 6-foot-3 wing man is more than a three-point shooter here. “I knew where he was going to go. He’s (Derry) a really good shooter, a 55 percent shooter.”
But Derry didn’t get to shoot it. “We knew going into this game that it was a big game,” Bresser said of its seeding implications for the winner. “We were confident.”
It didn’t matter that Dixie had all the momentum and the No. 2 spot this week in the KHSAA’s RPI rankings for the Ninth Region, ahead of No. 4 Lloyd.
“I think we came together as a team after a couple of losses,” said Lloyd’s 6-8 big-time prospect EJ Walker who has signed with South Carolina. “We worked it out in practice.” And figured out the problem, Walker said. “Those other teams wanted it more.”
Not on this night.
The best defense they’ve played all season? “Finally,” Coach Mike Walker – EJ’s father – said with a big smile. After an early season schedule that he called “grueling,” and had the Juggs competing against the likes of Kentucky’s No. 1 team, Louisville St. Xavier, and No. 2 Great Crossing, and Ashland Blazer and Louisville Male and Harlan County and Newport and Covington Catholic and Cooper — “eight or 10 of the top 30,” Walker said, “we kind of got back to that.”
And now, Walker looks back at those first-half-of-the-season challenges and says maybe “you need losses.” You do if you learn from them, he says.
As this team showed it has, especially the way the Juggs came out of halftime on that 18-2 third-quarter run where complementary players like Anthony Blaackar and Jayden Humphrey scored time and again on quick cuts through and behind the Dixie defenders for 10 and 13 points respectively.
All Walker told them at halftime was simply this: “Stay the course . . . stay disciplined defensively.”
As they did. And then some.
Had Dixie Heights not scored 13 late points in the final four minutes of the game when both teams had backups in with Lloyd leading 45-18, this one could have been indescribably ugly.
SCORING SUMMARY
DIXIE HEIGHTS 6 10 2 13-31
LLOYD MEMORIAL 10 8 18 16—52
DIXIE HEIGHTS (12-4): Metzger 0 1 0-0 3, Rubemeyer 1 0 2-2 4, Simpson 2 0 0-0 4, Seng 0 0 0-0 0, Niehues 2 0 1-2 5, Morris 0 1 0-0 3, Derry 3 1 0-0 9, Collins 0 1 0-0 3; TOTALS: 8 4 3-4 31.
LLOYD MEMORIAL (14-6): Blaackar 4 0 2-2 10, Sebastian 3 0 0-0 6, Walker 2 1 4-6 11, Humphrey 5 1 0-0 13, Bresser 1 2 0-0 8, Copeland 1 0 0-0 2, Lewis 1 0 0-0 2; TOTALS: 17 4 6-8 52.