‘Plenty there to work with.’ Scott County turned a rebuild into a reload.
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Sweet Sixteen stories
The 2020 Boys’ Sweet 16 was postponed before it began because of the coronavirus pandemic. The stoppage of our annual high school basketball state tournament denied 16 schools and their communities — for many — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for recognition on one of Kentucky’s most prominent stages. In the absence of basketball, the Herald-Leader is telling their stories. Click below to read the stories published so far.
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Editor’s Note: The 2020 Boys’ Sweet 16 was postponed before it began because of the coronavirus pandemic. The stoppage of our annual high school basketball state tournament denied 16 schools and their communities — for many — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for recognition on one of Kentucky’s most prominent stages. In the absence of basketball, the Herald-Leader is telling their stories.
After the last game of each season, Scott County’s traditional team meeting begins with everyone.
Once the plaudits and thank yous are all said, the seniors leave the room so the meeting can continue with next season’s group.
Walking out that door in 2019 were seven seniors, including some of the best players in Scott County history and their retiring coach, Billy Hicks, a living legend.
What was left was one sometime starter and a bunch of guys whose biggest minutes came on the junior varsity squad.
Soon to be head coach Tim Glenn, a longtime Hicks assistant who’d been the Cardinals’ JV coach for years, liked what he saw.
“In looking around, I knew that there was plenty there to work with,” Glenn remembered. “We made a vow right then and said, ‘Hey guys, there’s enough sitting here, if applied right, there’s enough sitting here that we can get back to Rupp Arena. And I think each one of those kids felt that”
Aaron Leake felt it.
“I totally believed him,” the now senior said. “I’d been playing with these guys for a long time. I really felt like exactly what Coach Glenn said. We had enough to get where we wanted to be.”
Terrin Hamilton, the sometime starter, did, too.
“Even though we were losing a lot of good players, all the other teams were losing a lot of good players, too,” Hamilton said. “In my heart, I just knew we could get back to the Sweet 16.”
And they did. But Scott County’s path to the 11th Region championship would be more trying and more precious than they’d imagined. First came the the talent split with Great Crossing, the new school down the road. That brought more opportunities, but also more uncertainty.
Out of the gate, though, the Cardinals showed promise, knocking off a highly regarded Bardstown team with Louisville-commit JJ Traynor.
But trouble lay ahead. Scott County lost 11 of its next 20 games, including humbling setbacks to new crosstown rival Great Crossing and 42nd District foe Henry Clay. And they watched another district rival, Frederick Douglass, beat them on their own floor in the finals of their signature midseason tournament, the Toyota Classic.
“During that stretch, I said, ‘Look, I’m all about taking a loss here in the season to learn a lesson, but geez, there comes a point in time where losing’s not going to be an option any more and we’ve got to take all these things and put ‘em to use,’” Glenn said he told his team.
Glenn felt his team was getting the idea, but results continued to elude them. Scott County entered the postseason with a record of 15-15 — more losses than the program had endured over the previous three seasons combined.
But they felt they played hard despite tough losses to teams like Bourbon County and Oldham County.
“Yeah, there was a couple of them we weren’t hardly ready for, but I think those big games and the atmosphere of those helped us to be tournament ready by the end of the season,” Glenn said.
In the district finals, Scott County faced upstart Douglass, who shocked the state with a double-overtime upset of No. 3 Henry Clay two nights before. The Broncos had already beaten Scott County two out of three times in the regular season and they came out blazing in the first half, putting the Cardinals down 14 in the first quarter.
Glenn called a timeout to try to stop the run. A few minutes later, the deficit was 19.
“I told them, ‘Guys, that’s as good a punch as they’re going to throw.’” Glenn said of the Broncos. “We’ve weathered it. We’re going to settle in now and cut this thing to about five and we’ll put ourselves in a position to win it.”
They didn’t win it. But they cut it to five by halftime, took the lead in the third quarter before running out of gas. Douglass’s hard-driving style and the narrow defeat proved a valuable lesson for the next round.
“After playing Douglass, we just really wanted to get that (region) win,” Leake said. “That really made us strive harder. In the Catholic game we really stepped it up.”
Defense would be the key.
“We’re going to be as good of a team as we guard (defensively) because we score enough points most of the time to beat anybody,” Glenn said.
Against Lexington Catholic in the 11th Region finals, the defense showed up and, unlike the district game against Douglass, this time it was Scott County that came out hot, shooting 63 percent from the field in the first half and only trailing once, by a single point in the second.
Final score: 65-62. The Cardinals (19-16) toppled a favored team that had lost only twice to that point and secured the program’s fourth straight region championship.
When news of the postseason’s suspension reached them, Coach Glenn had this message for his team: Only two other Scott County teams got to end their season with a win.
“You’ll be talked about in this community for a long time. They’ll remember it. It will go down with some of this coronavirus stuff, but they’ll remember what you boys did,” Glenn said. “You’re still going to be a special team that’s remembered here at Scott County.”
This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 7:28 AM.
