Special group of seniors — led by a Mr. Basketball contender — clicked at the right time
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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.
Reflecting on a season without a sense of closure, Collins basketball coach Chris Gaither talked about his latest senior class and acknowledged there had always been “some what-ifs.”
This Titans’ team featured six seniors — five who had been together for all four years of high school — and the signs for success had been apparent from the start.
“You could tell the talent was there,” Gaither said. “This is one of the most skilled groups I’ve ever had combined into one class. They can shoot the ball well. They pass the ball well. But the biggest what-if, I think, with them, was toughness.
“The question (was): Can you become that special team? Can you really win a region and compete for a state championship? Because they talked about it. This group, when they were freshmen, they talked about it. And some of the grind that it takes to win a tournament was missing.”
Gaither had a gritty-from-the-start star in Dayvion McKnight, but how would the rest of this bunch evolve?
It turned out, this was a group that had been together for a long time and ultimately clicked at just the right time, leading the relatively new Collins High School to what could have been its best season yet.
Just before the Sweet 16 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Collins — a team with high expectations coming into the season — had seemingly found its stride.
The Titans rolled through their first four postseason games — winning those games by an average of 18.8 points with no margin closer than 14 points — setting up an 8th Region title matchup with Oldham County, the team that had knocked Collins out the previous two seasons and accounted for the Titans’ most recent loss, a 55-44 defeat exactly four weeks earlier.
In that first matchup, Oldham County’s trademark defensive pressure had given Collins fits. This time, the Titans weathered the storm, won the game, and stamped their ticket to Rupp Arena.
There, Collins was scheduled to face Male — considered the state tournament favorite — in the first round, a third matchup with a team that had defeated the Titans twice during the season, though the most recent loss came in January by just four points. A lot had changed since then.
“I felt like we had gotten leaps and bounds better since we played them the two times this year,” Gaither said. “Obviously, having a week and a half to prepare, you kind of felt good, based on how my team’s been playing. … I felt like we were going to get better. Because of the energy and the focus that we’ve had in practice.”
‘He deserves Mr. Basketball’
The driving force behind Collins in recent seasons has been Dayvion McKnight, a four-year starter, a key player on the school’s 2017 Sweet 16 team, and a top contender for this year’s Mr. Basketball honor.
Before the state tournament three years ago, when McKnight was just a freshman, Gaither said in an interview with the Herald-Leader that he was “the most mature player I’ve ever coached.” As time passed, he only got better.
“I told my assistant coach back then: ‘Dayvion will be the best player to ever put on a Collins uniform.’ And, as a coach, you don’t say those things lightly, because there are so many unknowns,” Gaither said. “But the knowns about Dayvion as a freshman were just incredible. You knew that he was going to show up and just compete like crazy every day. You knew his toughness. You knew his tenacity. You knew he had a good feel for the game.
“And he has really, truly become — I would say he deserves Mr. Basketball.”
McKnight — a 6-foot-2 senior who signed with Western Kentucky in the fall — averaged 20.0 points and 8.1 rebounds per game this season, but it’s the other stuff that stood out to Gaither, who praised his star player for always competing, giving the extra effort, defending the other team’s best player, doing whatever it took to make his team better. The Collins coach recounted a key play at a key moment in the Titans’ region title victory over Oldham County that featured McKnight sprinting from half court for a perfectly timed block off the backboard in transition.
“You remember things like that,” he said. “You don’t remember big shots — unless they’re game winners — as a coach. You usually remember those hustle plays like that. And Dayvion has had an enormous amount of plays like that.”
No one-man team
McKnight has impressed since his freshman season, but there was much more to Collins.
“We had six seniors,” Gaither said, reiterating the team dynamic to this particular squad.
At just about any other school in the state, Marcellus Vail would have been getting all the spotlight. The 6-2 senior guard actually led Collins in scoring last season, and a Herald-Leader poll of state coaches coming into this campaign ranked Vail as the No. 13 player in Kentucky.
Gaither said Vail made major improvements from his sophomore to junior year, then signed with Samford this past fall. He was hoping for even more as a senior, and he wasn’t sure it would come. Until it did.
“Toward the end of January, you could tell a change in him that, ‘You know what? I wanna win. I wanna lay it all out there.’ His practices were incredible,” Gaither said. “He was talkative. His leadership just blossomed. He’s always had that personality where people followed him. And that leadership just took a new level toward the end of January.”
Tyson Turner was a three-year starter and one of the team’s leading players as a senior. He suffered what appeared to be a possible season-ending injury in February, but a second doctor’s opinion cleared him to play in the postseason. In the meantime, Jacoby Evans — an undersized guard and the school’s star running back — assumed his starting role. Evans had never been a key player in the Titans’ rotation, despite being with the program for four years, but he performed so well that Gaither kept him in the starting five even when Turner returned.
Josh Scriber had also been with the Titans’ program all four years and was the team’s fifth-leading scorer as a senior. Ben Omer home-schooled his first three years of high school and came to Collins as a senior. He didn’t make a big dent in the box scores, but Gaither praised his attitude and effort.
“The character that those kids displayed was just so resilient, and so special for our team,” he said.
The “what-ifs” that Gaither saw in this group nearly four years ago will now be replaced by the “what-if” that comes with the abrupt postponement of this Sweet 16. Recently, the Collins coach texted his team and said that it would’ve been really nice to be sitting on a bus with each of them, riding back from Lexington as state champions.
Perhaps that would’ve happened. But if the final game for this special group was indeed that 8th Region title victory on March 1, it was still quite a ride.
“You know, it’s hard to put it all in perspective, because it’s such an odd feeling — the fact that it just ended,” Gaither said. “The thing about this team — to me, more than winning the 8th Region — it was more of, ‘What’s the journey like?’ And for them, the way they responded toward the end of January and into February, the journey was fun. It was something you were looking forward to every day: going to practice, seeing what they were doing on defense and how well they were playing on offense together.
“For me, that’s probably what I’ll remember the most: it was fun. … It was just a real fun journey to be on with them.”
This story was originally published April 7, 2020 at 7:38 AM.
