Clark County fends off Warren Central for second Boys’ Sweet 16 championship
For the first time in 71 years, the boys’ basketball state title will take up residence in Winchester.
Clark County defeated Warren Central 43-42 in the UK HealthCare Boys’ Sweet 16 championship game Saturday night at Rupp Arena.
A closely fought, back-and-forth battle came down to a potential tying free throw for Warren Central with 3.2 seconds left in the game. Dragons point guard Izayiah Villafuerte made his first foul shot, but Clark County called timeout before he lined up for his second.
When Villafuerte stepped back up, his second shot bounced twice on the rim and rolled off. Warren Central’s Omari Glover grabbed the rebound but had the ball slapped away from him in a frantic scramble under the basket. It was ruled off Glover out of bounds. Clark had only to successfully inbound the ball to start the party.
“I think it’s a lot of kids’ dream just to play at Rupp. You know, most people don’t make it out of district or region. To actually win it? I mean, who gets to feel that?” said senior point guard Aden Slone, who looked to be the one who caused the final deflection on Glover’s rebound. “So, we’re really overloaded, right now.”
Slone missed a free throw that set up Warren Central’s last gasp to tie, but his spectacular pass to teammate Trent Edwards moments earlier helped put the Cardinals up 43-38 with 1:11 to play.
Edwards faced a Warren Central trap near midcourt and spotted Edwards alone under the basket. He launched a one-arm throw to his center, who caught it, steered into the bucket and got fouled on the play for an “and-one” that he converted.
“There’s nobody back there with my athletic, 6-8 big man, so I just threw it to the sky,” Slone said. “And I knew that he was going to get it, because he’s been doing it for the last two seasons. It wasn’t that gutsy. It’s just what we do.”
Clark County, the team that led the state in scoring (82.9 points per game), never cracked 80 this week, and it only scored 50-plus twice. The Cardinals leaned on a stingy defense — their tournament opponents were held to an average under 43 points — to win the school’s second championship.
“I can’t say enough about these guys — 24 hours of just pure toughness, playing together and grinding out wins,” said Clark County coach Josh Cook, whose Cardinals had to win four games in three days under the grueling state tournament format. “We like to score … but defense wins championships. You guard, and you have to figure it out.”
Defensive switch key to victory
Clark led much of a closely contested first half and held a 22-21 edge at the break. But after building a lead of as many as seven points midway through the third quarter, Clark County fell victim to the same fate that had struck Warren Central’s other foes this week. The Dragons rallied to victory from large deficits in each of their previous three games and twice held opponents scoreless for more than eight minutes.
For Clark, its scoreless drought lasted more than five minutes as Warren Central went on a 12-0 run to take a 36-31 lead on a pair of Omari Glover free throws with 7:21 left to play in the game.
A Clark timeout set up a play for Tanner Walton to get to the rim and cut the lead to 36-33 a few seconds later, but it also marked the beginning of a new defensive strategy for Cook’s Cardinals. Clark unleashed a 1-3-1 half-court trap that constantly double-teamed Warren Central’s ball handers. It produced three Warren Central turnovers and a missed shot over the next three minutes.
“We talked about it. If we could get to the second half and we could start changing defenses, we thought that would give us an edge,” Cook said. “It’s a game-changer. You can’t go into halftime and fix it. … Then you have Sammy Hernandez, a senior who understood completely what we wanted to do and whose number isn’t always called but was tremendous on the top of that.”
While Warren Central struggled to adapt, Clark’s offense seized on the moment. Slone drove for a layup and foul shot to tie the game at 36-36 with 5:21 left. Walton got free on the left wing and nailed a three-pointer that put Clark County back into the lead 39-36 with 3:57 to play.
“It means everything. This is a once in a lifetime experience,” said Walton, who finished with 13 points. “Every kid dreams of this to grow up and play on that court — not only just play, but win. It’s just crazy.”
The Cardinals never trailed again even though Villafuerte hit a three-pointer down the stretch and later drew the foul that delivered the last bit of drama.
Standout junior Jerone Morton earned tournament most valuable player honors, scoring 14 in the title game, including six early in the third quarter that helped give the Cardinals their seven-point lead. Morton battled through shooting struggles all tournament as he also usually drew the opponent’s most difficult defensive assignment against some of the state’s best players.
“Everybody can do something. That’s what’s good about this team. We all can go. I’m just glad that my team has trust in me and kept feeding me the ball,” Morton said. “I know I was missing, but I know I trust them and they trust me.”
Clark builds a powerhouse program
Clark County finished 37-1 and without a loss to a team within the state of Kentucky. The Cardinals cruised in its opener against Perry County Central and was on its way to a double-digit win over Pikeville, the top-ranked team in the KHSAA RPI, in the quarterfinals before a late rally by the Panthers nearly sent them home. Cinderella showed up in the form of Lincoln County on Saturday morning; the Patriots forced two overtime periods before the Cardinals finally put them away.
Much ado was made throughout the season and during the tournament about the make-up of Clark County’s team. Of its top six scorers, only Morton has been part of the program dating back to middle school. Walton, a senior, crossed the 1,000-point mark as a junior last season at Lexington Christian Academy. Sam Parrish was Tates Creek’s leading scorer (16.9 points) as a sophomore in 2020-21. Slone, a senior, was a double-digit scorer at Danville before transferring ahead of his junior season. Edwards was a reserve in Paris’ program before enrolling at Clark ahead of the 2019-20 season, his sophomore campaign. Tyleik Maxwell and Stanley Smothers, who played sparingly this season, were at one time in Lexington schools.
“The way things are nowadays with social media — when you have success, you better have thick skin, because there’s gonna be a lot of people talk,” Cook said. “And they’ll be a lot of people who try to pull you away and try to pull you back down. And you’ve got to make a choice about what’s most important. Is it about you? Is it about us? And these guys made decisions. It’s about us.”
In recent years, Clark County made significant upgrades to its athletics facilities by finally building them on the site of the new George Rogers Clark High School campus it opened in 2013. Before the 2019-20 season, Clark fielded its teams at the old school’s facilities. The new 4,750 seat gym and all that goes with it has helped foster Clark’s basketball success.
In an unpublished interview with the Herald-Leader earlier this season, Cook acknowledged the new facilities have been an attraction, but it’s to be part of a winning program and a good school, he said, adding “It’s about the team. Nobody’s getting 30 points a game here. … These kids sacrifice. That’s what it’s about.”
Cook hit on that theme again Saturday night.
“If you ever want to learn life lessons, you’ve got to sacrifice,” Cook said. “And if you sacrifice in the end, you will be rewarded. And that’s why we’re state champions.”
Clark County became the 21st school in state history to earn more than one state title. In 1951, it defeated western Kentucky’s Cuba (now merged into Graves County) 69-44 in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum. The four-time finalist hadn’t reached the championship game since that title run, which was their second ever; they lost to Lafayette, 55-51, the season before their breakthrough victory.
Saturday’s one-point margin was the narrowest since 2013, when Madison Central defeated Ballard 65-64. The average margin of victory in this year’s tournament was 8.1 points.
Warren Central’s young team
Warren Central (29-4) sought its second state title (first since 2004) in its fifth appearance at the Sweet 16 under head coach William Unseld. Led by a resilient group of underclassmen, the Dragons eliminated Male in the first round, Murray in the quarterfinals and Covington Catholic in Saturday’s semifinal round. It trailed by 13, 11 and nine points, respectively, in those contests before earning close victories.
Glover and Chappelle Whitney led the Dragons with 10 points each. Glover, the party responsible for the final turnover, thought the ball bounced off a Cardinal’s foot, but even he wasn’t as visibly sullen as one might expect after experiencing such heartbreak. He and the other young Dragons followed the example of their head coach, who was relatively jovial in the postgame press conference.
“I think we let everybody know we’ve got a good basketball team,” Unseld said. “We’re losing Jaiden (Lawrence) but we’ll bring everybody else back. We’ve got a chance to be real special. I’ve got a tough group of kids, man. I was proud of ‘em. I told ‘em they ain’t got nothing to be sad about. Let’s enjoy it, take some time off. … It was a heck of a game, you couldn’t ask for nothing else. We had a chance to win it.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2022 at 8:33 PM.
