‘A classic basketball game.’ Mighty CovCath overcomes tiny Lyon County in Sweet 16.
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2022 Boys’ Sweet 16 coverage
Click below to read all of the coverage from Kentucky.com and the Lexington Herald-Leader during the Boys’ Sweet 16 State Basketball Tournament in Rupp Arena.
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Covington Catholic probably should have cruised against Lyon County. Lyons Coach Ryan Perry admitted that in the press conference following his team’s 59-57 loss in the state tournament quarterfinals Friday night.
Yet the Colonels — ranked No. 2 in the state and with five times as many boys in their school as Lyon County — needed just about every second to tick away to advance in the UK HealthCare Boys’ Sweet 16. The first words out of Scott Ruthsatz’s mouth?
“Wow, what a game,” said the Colonels head coach.
BOX SCORE: Covington Catholic 59, Lyon County 57
He watched his point guard, Evan Ipsaro, limp to the free-throw line and calmly sink a pair of free throws to give CovCath a 59-55 lead with 8.8 seconds left. Minutes earlier, Ipsaro laid on the Rupp Arena floor with an ankle injury suffered in a scrum for a rebound. He exited with 4:18 to play before returning at the 2:20 mark, his Colonels up 50-47.
Ipsaro’s game-sealing free throws followed a thrilling 30-second sequence that ended with Lyon County standout Travis Perry pulling up from beyond the college three-point line and connecting, getting the Lyons to within 57-55 with 35 seconds left.
By that point, Lyon County had committed only three team fouls, so time evaporated as it tried to take the ball before fouling. Following Ipsaro’s free throws, the Lyons called their last timeout, more or less sealing their fate; they connected on their final shot but had no way to stop the clock. The game ended with the ball out of bounds.
“You don’t have to hustle or anything,” Ruthsatz told guard Brady Hussey, the designated inbounder. “You just hold it.”
It was an anti-climatic conclusion to one of, if not the best, games played in this year’s state tournament. The only other contest to finish within a single-possession margin was the first-round bout between Warren Central and Male, two schools with higher-end enrollments and a lengthy track record of reaching “The Greatest Show in Hoops.”
Covington Catholic, an all-boys school, has 545 students to Lyon County’s 281. Only 133 of those kids are boys. The Lyons hadn’t been to a state tournament since 1951, and had never won a game in it before Thursday. CovCath has won two state championships under Ruthsatz, in 2014 and 2018.
Private versus public. Big versus small. Overdog versus underdog. It delivered everything but the result most of the approximately 10,000 fans in Rupp Arena wanted to see.
“This was a true David versus Goliath today, in every shape and form,” Ryan Perry said. “It was to everybody except these guys out there playing.”
Kentucky is one of only two states in the nation that hold single-class basketball tournaments to crown a state champion. (Delaware is the other.) Calls for the KHSAA to follow the remaining 48 states’ lead have never really gained steam, but the debate still tends to break out this time of year.
Ruthsatz, who came to CovCath from New Jersey, endorsed the notion that Kentucky should maintain its single-class tournament. A cynic would say, “Of course he would,” but his two best teams got the better of a school with twice as many boys as CovCath — Scott County. Ultimately, you have to beat whoever’s in front of you, and in Kentucky that really can be just about any school that fields a team.
“There’s a lot of pride in these schools,” Ruthsatz said. “You hear it when they announce these guys, they’re going nuts. And somebody told me it’s the first time they’ve been in the state tournament for 71 years. That’s where you rally the whole town. There’s probably not a business open in Lyon County right now, which is a great thing for the state of Kentucky. We need to hold that. ...
“If you’ve got five, six guys that can play? You can beat anybody.”
Ryan Perry was on the same page as Ruthsatz after Goliath narrowly escaped David.
“I’ve been coming and bringing these guys (as fans) for years, and it’s the greatest event that I could imagine participating in,” said Ryan Perry. “It was an honor. It’s so cool whenever teams that are supposed to be so different are able to have something like that. I mean, that was a really good basketball game out there and, on paper, it probably shouldn’t have been a really good basketball game.
“But, you got heart and you got pride and all that stuff that figures into it. Then, suddenly, you got a classic basketball game.”
The variety of which you’ll only find in one other state.
This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 10:32 PM.
