By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
RICHMOND — Nobody has ever done it, not in the previous 32 years of the combined girls’-boys’ All “A” state basketball tournament.
And no, we’re not talking about the 49 points that the nearly unstoppable Indian, Jacob Meyer, put up Sunday, against overwhelming odds. Nobody has seen anything like that either.
But yes, it probably wasn’t fair to expect the Holy Cross Indian boys to accomplish the unprecedented double after the Holy Cross girls had won the state title opening game of the championship doubleheader at Eastern Kentucky University’s Baptist Health Arena.
Holy Cross’ Jacob Meyers scored 49 points. (Photo by Ted Jackson)
Not because of history or precedent, however. What maybe wasn’t fair was expecting Holy Cross to do so against the overwhelming physical advantages of an Evangel Christian team, the No. 1 team overall in Louisville’s Sixth Region.
We’ll let Holy Cross Coach Casey Sorrell explain it to you.
“That’s the biggest, most athletic high school basketball team I’ve ever seen,” Sorrell said. He might not have had to add the “high school” part.
“For a school with 37 students, they just happen to have four who are 6-10 or bigger,” Sorrell said of the small private school in Louisville, with an enrollment that’s 280th among Kentucky’s 289 secondary schools.
And yes, we know that some folks will say that Evangel is a basketball program in search of a high school. We will note that the school’s lone varsity sport is boys’ basketball, which they take very seriously.
To make the matchup really difficult, even for a Holy Cross team that starts a 7-footer, Sam Gibson, with four guards was the way that much of the time two of the tall Evangel Christian front-liners were in the game at the same time, sometimes three.
The quartet of Cyr Malonga, Johnny Djema, Ben Tshaka Mukadi and Isaiah Chitapa would combine for 30 points and even more devastatingly, 30 rebounds.
“That’s hard to overcome,” Sorrell said of the 46-25 rebounding edge that had the Eagles often playing volleyball above the basket, with one, two, three, even four follows before getting the ball to go down.
Coach Casey Sorrell (File photo)
And yet, down by 11 to start the final quarter, 55-44, a gutty Holy Cross team almost did . . . overcome. They got as close as one, 61-60, with 1:20 left. And on Meyer’s 49th point, closed it to 64-62 with 15 seconds left.
“It happened on the defensive end of the floor,” Sorrell said of the bounce back. “We sped them up.” Which is the one advantage the Indians had. Along with Meyer, of course.
But a final chance, after a pair of missed Evangel free throws with 8.3 seconds left, saw Meyer’s contested driving layup as he plowed through the giants, roll off. An Evangel free throw with 1.0 second left made it a 65-62 final.
“I saw (Christian) Doerr slide over for the charge so I did a Euro-step but it just didn’t go,” Meyer said. Of his 34 shots, all but one or two contested, he hit 17, including four of eight from three-point range.
And he hit the floor at least a dozen times, going to the line 14 times, converting 11.
“That was the most ever for me,” Meyer said. Not the points. He’d hit 49 against Lyon County, but the times he hit the floor. The Eagles got their money’s worth when it came to fouling.
The strange thing about this game was that the much smaller Indians, so dependent on speed and finesse, were called for 18 fouls to the 14 for the aggressive and physical Eagles. In the first half alone, four Indians were left laid out on the floor, away from the ball, with no call.
Photo by Ted Jackson
“I don’t understand that,” is all Sorrell would say.
What he would say was about Meyer, who scored 25 of Holy Cross’ 28 first-half points, and 49 of their 62, was this.
“I think he put the state on notice,” Sorrell said. “The narrative about him, that he’s just a scorer, could not be more false. He’s a winner. He rebounds. He plays defense. He does whatever we need him to do.”
In this game, the ambidextrous Meyer not only gave up his body on drives into the lane, while scoring with either hand from anywhere on the court. “It depends on how they’re guarding me,” he says of which hand he shoots with.
As for going against that kind of size: “When I see bigger guys, I have no fear,” he says, which isn’t bragging when you do it over and over.
“I haven’t played against anybody like that,” said the 6-3 Doerr, Evangel’s leading scorer with 18. “I’ve never seen anybody like that. He’s fearless. And if you stop him, he backs off and hits threes.”
He does indeed. By himself, with 49 of his team’s 62 points, Meyer outscored six of the seven Eagles’ scorers. And at times, it seems, he had to challenge all five Eagle defenders on the drives down the lane.
With his teammates hitting on just five of 16 field goal attempts, Meyer had no choice.
“He takes a lot of hits,” Sorrell said. But just kept popping back up.
Photo by Ted Jackson
“We just have to put this behind us,” Sorrell said of the loss. Nothing else. The effort could not have been better.
“We can’t worry about anything else but us,” Sorrell said, “we have to be ourselves, it’s gotten us this far.”
And while they may not have an All “A” Championship trophy to bring home – although the runner-up trophy was nearly five-feet tall, there was all sorts of “championship” talk in the Indians’ locker room.
“We’ve got the district and region,” Meyer said after improving his state-leading 34.0-points-per-game average to 34.7, “and we’re hoping to get to Rupp Arena,” where there’s another state championship trophy up for grabs.
SHORT SHOTS: The All “A” all-tournament team included three Indians – Gibson, Javier Ward and Matthew Dreas with Meyer named tourney MVP. Three Evangel Christian players selected were Doerr, Kyran Tilley and Malonga.
BOX SCORE
HOLY CROSS 14 14 16 18—62
EVANGEL CHRISTIAN 13 23 19 10—65
HOLY CROSS (16-6): Dreas 1-1-0-3, Ward 3-1-0-7, Smith 1-0-0-2, Meyer 17-4-11-49, Gibson 0-0-1-1, Ambrocio 0-0-0-0, McElheney 0-0-0-0, TOTALS: 22-6-12-62.
EVANGEL CHRISTIAN (20-3): Doerr 7-2-2-18, Tilley 6-3-0-15, Davis 0-0-0-0, Taylor 0-0-2-2, Malonga 2-0-2-6, Djema 5-0-2-12, Mukadi 4-0-0-8, Chitapa 2-0-0-4, TOTALS: 26-5-8-65.
IMO permitting this basketball factory into the All A tourney is contrary to the spirit of the event. Fairly certain Stan Steidel did not envision this.