From 1-19 finish to the Sweet Sixteen, Meade County’s crazy season | Lexington Herald Leader

It was the questions from Noah Schwartz’s Meade County High School classmates that started getting to him. Why can’t you win?

For Aiden Matthews, it was the abuse Meade County players took from fans of rival 3rd Region schools that really cut. If you win our region, it’s an embarrassment to the 3rd Region.

Those who aspire for the 100th Kentucky Boys’ Basketball State Tournament to be historic for reasons other than chronology have already gotten their wish. Over a century of the Sweet Sixteen, there has never been a team make a state tournament off a season as crazy as the one 3rd Region champion Meade County surmounted.

Having lost in the region championship game the prior two seasons, Coach Jason Tripure’s Greenwaves began this season 8-1 behind senior star James Baker in spite of losing four starters from last year’s team.

Then the Meade County season went crashing off the rails. Mostly, that corresponded with the 6-foot-7 Baker being sidelined for two months after tearing a ligament in his left thumb Dec. 28 while trying to brace his fall after being fouled on a dunk attempt against Central.

Baker is Meade County’s leading scorer (16.3 points). He is the team’s leading rebounder (6.6). He is also the Greenwaves’s primary ballhandler and on-court decision maker.

Losing him was like losing three players.

“James just takes a lot of pressure off of everybody else,” said Tripure, the nephew of longtime former Lexington high school coach Bob Tripure. “When he’s not there, the other kids are having to do things they are not really used to doing.”

As valuable as all knew Baker was, nobody in Meade County expected his absence to lead to free fall.

Yet the Greenwaves started losing and couldn’t stop. A team that had begun the year aspiring to win the 3rd Region lost 14 games in a row. Meade County ended its regular season having lost 19 of its final 20.

The rapid change in fortunes was a disorienting experience.

“Beginning of the year, we’re winning, the crowds are big. Everybody is fired up,” Tripure said. “James goes down, you can feel the energy level out of the whole school go down. It started getting a little quiet. Obviously, our crowds got smaller.”

Amidst all the losing, going to school was no picnic for the Meade County players.

“In one of my classes, after every game we lost, they always wrote our record on this board,” said Schwartz, a junior guard. “I guess it was a friendly joke, but I didn’t take it too funny. One of the days, I just went over there and erased. I was just sick of it.”

One of the oldest maxims in coaching is every game matters. Tripure found himself telling his team not to worry about the regular season. Meade County was going to get Baker back and it could still make a run in the postseason.

“I was just hoping James was going to make it back,” Tripure said.

After he tore the ligament, Baker said doctors at Kleinert Kutz Hand Care Center told him he would have to keep the injured thumb immobile for a month and a half.

“I had to get surgery and wear a thumb cast for six weeks,” Baker said. “And, when I got (the cast) off, they told me I had to wait two weeks to play just because, not having any movement in it for six weeks, it would take time to get the feeling back.”

Baker, a right-handed-dominant player, returned to practice the day after Meade County’s final regular-season game. He practiced twice before the Greenwaves faced Breckinridge County in the 11th District semifinals — the game whose outcome would determine whether or not Meade advanced to the 3rd Region Tournament.

Off those two practices, Baker scored 28 points and grabbed 13 rebounds as Meade beat Breckinridge 63-56. “Honestly, I don’t know how I did it,” Baker said. “It just seemed like I couldn’t miss.”

Though the Greenwaves lost to Hancock County 61-60 in the district finals, the players drew confidence from how they played.

What happened in the 3rd Region tourney in Owensboro has folks in Brandenburg joking about which actors will be cast to play which players in the movie “Meade County.”

Meade defeated Edmonson County 54-43 in the quarterfinals. In the semifinals, it avenged its loss to Owensboro Catholic in the 2016 3rd Region finals with a 46-42 win.

All that was standing between Meade County and the most improbable Sweet Sixteen trip in Kentucky history was Daviess County — the one team Meade had beaten during its 1-19 stretch.

With a trip to Rupp Arena at stake, the Greenwaves did it again, winning 52-50 to earn the school’s second boys’ state tournament appearance (1984).

Coming home, the team bus carrying the players who were being joshed by classmates about their losing ways only weeks before got a police escort back into Brandenburg. It was near midnight, yet fans lined the streets to welcome the regional champions home. “Most fun bus ride I’ve ever been on,” Schwartz said.

Now, after a basketball season that felt like a roller coaster ride, Meade County will bring its 13-21 record to Lexington Thursday at 8 p.m. to face 9th Region champ Cooper (28-4).

The extremes of a season unlike any other in the 100-year history of the Kentucky Sweet Sixteen are still being processed.

“It’s just a lot of emotions going through,” said Matthews, a junior center. “After we won (the region), I kind of teared up because I just feel so good for this team, just being able to bounce back and overcome so much.”