Lexington Catholic girls, Dunbar boys reach 43rd District basketball title games
The Lexington Catholic girls’ basketball team and the Paul Laurence Dunbar boys’ basketball team found themselves in the same situation Tuesday night.
Both needed to defeat a city rival for the third time this season in the 43rd District Tournament semifinals at Lafayette High School in order to punch their respective tickets to not only the 43rd District title game, but also the 11th Region Tournament.
Both schools did just that, albeit with varying levels of drama, as the Knights and Bulldogs prolonged their 2022 seasons.
Lexington Catholic (12-15) will face either Lafayette or Tates Creek in the 43rd District girls’ championship game on Friday night.
Dunbar will face either Lexington Catholic or Lexington Christian in the 43rd District boys’ championship game on Friday night.
Both of the other 43rd District semifinals will be played Wednesday night, also at Lafayette, which will also be the site of the championship games.
GIRLS: Lexington Catholic 50, Paul Laurence Dunbar 36: A new tradition may have emerged for Lexington Catholic girls’ basketball on Tuesday.
The Knights participated in a walk-through practice early Tuesday before having a team meal at First Watch, the breakfast-focused chain cafe.
Head coach Lee Tegt offered plenty of selling points for the destination.
“Scrambled eggs, smoothies, iced coffee, anything you can name,” Tegt listed off. “I told them last Friday (that) we’re going to have a walk-through and we’re going to go to First Watch and you would have thought I had just gave each of them a million dollars.”
It also wouldn’t be a stretch for Tegt to connect the pregame fuel to his team’s solid performance against Dunbar.
LexCath got 17 points from freshman guard Abby Hammond and 16 from junior guard Katherine Truitt in a game the Knights never trailed in after halftime.
“They have approached it the right way this year,” Tegt said of his team. “When you look at multiple injuries, we dealt with COVID at one point. They always came and they just worked, they competed, which was the biggest thing. Which is the most you can ever ask of a 15-year old kid in sports, is just come in here and compete.”
LexCath scored 44-31 and 46-41 wins over Dunbar during the regular season, with Truitt scoring 14 points and 18 points in those contests.
While she still had 16 points Tuesday night, Tegt knew diversifying the scoring would be necessary to beat the Bulldogs a third time.
Tegt suspected Dunbar would box-and-chase or do some kind of “chase defense” on Truitt, so up stepped Hammond.
After combining for seven points in the two previous meetings with Dunbar, the LexCath freshman exploded with four made three-pointers Tuesday, something that’s become a more common occurrence.
“Anytime you start getting someone chased, it’s going to open up shots for other people. So you’ve just got to be calm and knock them down,” Tegt said, noting Hammond’s prowess as a starting pitcher on LexCath’s softball team. “I was like, ‘It’s just like firing a fastball in there on a 3-2 (count)‘ ... Our girls just stepped up, hit shots, filled their roles, it was a total team win.”
Sophomore Amber Brandon led Dunbar with 16 points as the Bulldogs’ season came to a close.
The Dunbar girls (8-17) will miss the 11th Region Tournament for a second straight season.
BOYS: Paul Laurence Dunbar 69, Tates Creek 62: Dunbar entered its third game of the season against Tates Creek on Tuesday having just beaten the Commodores by 30 points only 11 days ago.
Back in January, Dunbar won by seven points against Tates Creek.
Early on Tuesday, it looked like the teams’ postseason meeting would resemble their most recent encounter, but that soon changed.
Dunbar (14-11) led by as many as 14 points in the first quarter, and the margin was 12 at halftime thanks to 13 first-half points from senior forward Zach Carter.
But despite Dunbar’s second-half advantage growing to be as large as 15 points, Tates Creek always stayed just within striking distance.
The gap was 10 points in favor of Dunbar after three quarters and shrunk to as few as three points with less than three minutes left in the game, but that’s as close as Tates Creek got.
The backcourt duo of Jacobi Commodore and Eric Hackett combined for 30 points for Tates Creek, but clutch free-throw shooting and sturdy defense down the stretch by Dunbar prevented the big Bulldogs lead from completely slipping away.
Carter led Dunbar with 17 points, followed by Max VanDyke with 15 points and Nick Spalding with 14.
The Bulldogs went 13-of-15 from the foul line in the second half and never trailed in the win.
In his first season at Dunbar, head coach Murray Garvin — a former collegiate head coach at South Carolina State — has successfully piloted the Bulldogs back to the 43rd District title game, which the Bulldogs won last year in former head coach Scott Chalk’s final season before retirement.
“We just want to continue to build on the foundation that (Chalk) set, and hopefully get to that regional championship,” Garvin, who spent three years as a Tates Creek boys’ basketball assistant in the late 1990s, said last May when he became Dunbar’s head coach.
The Tates Creek boys (10-18) will miss the 11th Region Tournament for a second straight season.
This story was originally published February 23, 2022 at 7:43 AM.
