By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
Just another night in the 33rd District.
Technically, the district tournaments don’t start for another three weeks but go ahead and count Tuesday night’s Cooper-Conner game on the Bill Warfield Court in Hebron as an early postseason game if you’d like.
The two unbeaten teams in the district had something to prove here. Conner’s Cougars, after opening 1-3 and getting outscored by 58 points in those three losses, had gone 14-1 since then.
Cooper’s Jaguars, losers of four of their first nine, had strung together eight straight wins on the way to the top spot in the Ninth Region.
But Nate Browning’s Conner team, basically starting an all-guard lineup with leading scorer and rebounder Landon Warner sitting at home with the flu bug and slick guard Finn Louden also a bit under the weather, sprung a box-and-one on Cooper’s Andy Johnson and his tops-in-Northern Kentucky 24.2-points-a-game scoring average with Brady Bushman, an athletic Division I baseball prospect, doing the chasing.
It worked – for a while. And it frustrated the heck out of the 6-5 Johnson, no matter how much he tried – for a while.
“That put us on our heels,” said Cooper coach Tim Sullivan – for a while.
But there was something Sullivan pointed out to his players after the game: “You’d have thought we struggled to score but we had four double-figure scorers.”
And Johnson, who didn’t score his first field goal until 1:04 left in the third quarter, managed to score 10 in the final quarter to hold off a Conner team that fought back from an 11-point deficit to within four. But that’s as close as it got as Cooper made enough plays for a 63-56 district seeding win.
Two of Cooper’s double-figure scorers were 6-3 senior Jaidan Combs and 6-6 sophomore Roman Combs, who combined for 29 points (15 for Jaidan, 14 for Roman). The way Conner concentrated on Johnson gave the Combs’ duo their shot.
“We had an idea they were going to do it,” said Jaidan, one of the state’s leading football receivers for the state finalist Jaguars. “For sure,” Roman said, “we crashed the boards every play and got a lot of and-ones.”
That’s all they were hearing from the Cooper bench. “Get to the glass,” Sullivan called out, “get to the glass . . . we have to kill them in the paint.”
But if Sullivan singled out one player, it was his fourth double-figure scorer, Chris Rodriguez, who finished with 10 points, hitting all four of his free throws down the stretch and a big three-pointer at the end of the third when Conner came within three.
“And he was chasing Finn Louden all night,” Sullivan said. Not an easy job as the Conner junior, not fully healthy, hit for 22 points on drives, fallaway jumpers and threes, one of which came from near the Cougar mid-court logo.
“He’s a gamer,” Browning said, “a tough kid. He’s feeling really bad.”
“We wanted to throw something at them,” Browning said of the hybrid box-and-one defense that Bushman executed so well before landing on his head and missing several minutes in the third quarter. “He exceeded our expectations with how he played it.” After three quarters, Johnson had just six points on five shots.
“But we continue to talk about how we have to play 32 minutes,” Sullivan said, which the Jaguars did. As Johnson got back into the flow, it was really too much for a Conner team with “a short rotation,” Browning called it. with Warner sick and senior Landon Rankin out the rest of the season with a broken hand.
But still they stayed close. “Our guys don’t give up,” Browning said.
“I think they spent so much energy trying to get back into it,” Sullivan said of the Cougars
.
In the end, Cooper (14-4) just had more – and bigger – bodies than a 15-5 Conner team.
SCORING SUMMARY
COOPER 16 13 15 19—63
CONNER 14 10 11 21—56
Cooper (14-4): R. Combs 7 0-0 14, Brown 2 0-0 4, J. Combs 5 5-8 15, Rodrigues 2 4-4 10, Johnson 4 8-9 16, Stanton 0 1-2 1, Hampton 0 0-0 0, Knuckles 1 0-0 3; TOTALS: 21 18-26—63.
Conner (15-5): Huff 5 4-5 15, Bushman 3 0-0 6, Abousaleh 1 0-0 2, Back 2 0-0 5, T. Warner 1 1-2 4, Louden 9 0-0 22, Raider 1 0-0 2, Price 0 0-0 0; TOTALS: 22 5-7—56.