By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
Must be a game tonight, folks had to be thinking as they drove by on the Dixie Highway in Park Hills Tuesday evening and looked at the parking lot filling up.
As it turned out, there were four of them in Covington Catholic’s summer league.
But the one that the basketball insiders were here to see came last, at 8, between the host Colonels and the defending Ninth Region champion Newport Wildcats.
They also came to see CovCath’s newest star, Arkansas All-Stater Caden Miller, a 6-foot-9 lefty with refined skills and some serious hops.
“The thing that’s different about Newport now,” one longtime CovCath observer noted, “is they have a following.” As does CovCath, with restaurateur Jeff Ruby, Miller’s grandfather, spiffy as always in his tailored black suit, white tie and straw fedora, here to see him play.
Call the fan following even for this one, which should make for some interesting matchups next season.
Newport Coach Rod Snapp is hoping to schedule CovCath for the feature game in the Wildcats’ John Turner Classic in December. “We’d sell it out,” he says of the school’s holiday tourney.
But back to Tuesday, where these rivals were facing off against one another for the third time this summer. And while you can call it “summer” basketball, it’s not exactly a bunch of guys chucking it up and hoping it goes in as they look at their own stat sheet.
While the officiating might be laissez-faire here, the defense is not. In fact, it’s the defining element for both teams, allowed, even encouraged, to let their physicality express itself.
Which is why the fans will walk away with memories of the senior Miller’s three blocks against the athletic drives of sophomore Taylen Kinney, who has been offered scholarships recently by the likes of Xavier, Illinois, Louisville and Cincinnati.
Both players finished with an unofficial 16 points with Miller pulling down almost that many rebounds in the hour-long game where free throws count as two points without taking the time for two shots, and moving things on is the key here.
For a veteran Newport team that’s working on repeating as regional champ, there’s also a young, but hopefully deep CovCath team trying to figure out how to get back the crown it wore three out of the four previous years.
Each team had its issues. Newport was playing its fourth game Tuesday – it had already faced Augusta and Walton-Verona elsewhere during the day and Cincinnati Summit earlier at CovCath.
“I wanted to challenge them mentally,” Snapp says of the physical challenge of playing four games in a day.
And while the Wildcats lost just one starter off last year’s team, senior DeShaun Jackson transferred in from Cincinnati Taft and he proved a tough matchup for CovCath’s younger, smaller players.
But the Colonels unveiled 6-5 sophomore Donovan Bradshaw, who is an active, athletic rebounder and inside scorer with 12 points. And point guard Cash Harney, a football-basketball CovCath transfer from Beechwood, traded body blows with Wildcat defenders like Jabari Covington, DeShawn Anderson and Kinney.
And for a while, it worked as CovCath led 25-19 at half and by as much as 35-28 midway through the third quarter. But with returning starter Brady Hussey, the regional singles champ in tennis, sitting out while rehabbing an ankle injury, and Tuesday starter Noah Johnson injured in the first half and not returning and top backups Nolan Ruthsatz and Jake Stewart in Wyoming on a mission/retreat, the Colonels faded as the Wildcats went on a 27-10 run the final quarter-and-a-half for a 55-45 victory.
For Kinney, who was offered by Xavier after a recent team camp there, the big-time offers “are motivation for me,” he says, “to work harder and get more of them.” He’ll be heading to Illinois for his first recruiting visit the first of August and then to Ohio State.
As for Miller, who is coming in from Bentonville, Ark., it’s a bit of a change in basketball. “It’s a lot more fast-paced,” he said. “There’s a lot more skill. Down in the South, you get by with physical talent but here, you see players with more skills.”
The move here may have changed Miller’s college focus. “I’ve been looking at Xavier and Cincinnati,” he said, with his father, Caleb, a former Bengal and now the executive director of the Jeff Ruby Foundation. “Although I might go back down South.”
As to having his famous grandfather here watching him play, “It’s pretty fun,” Caden says. “He comes in here in his fancy suit. That’s what he does.”
What Ruby also does, his grandson says, in addition to his restaurant work, is help young people who need it get help with their sports.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on twitter @dweber3440.