ROSS TWP. — Peyton Hendricks had one thing on his mind Saturday night. That was to put the Ross High School boys basketball team in position to win its season opener.
The senior guard scored a game-high 15 points and the Rams held the Talawanda Brave to four points in the first half on the way to a 57-24 victory.
“We were really locked in,” Hendricks said. “We have a really good JV team, and they practice really competitive and did a really good job of replicating Talawanda.”
Ross (1-0) led the entire game and fired 20 of 44 (45%) from the floor. Daniel Fogt scored nine points, and Ethan Fuersich also had nine off the bench. Ben Voegele added eight points.
“We’ve really talked about it since Day 1 with taking pride every single time we step on the floor — whether it would be the offensive end or the defensive end,” said David Lane, who started his eighth year at the Ross helm. “Bench players, whatever the case may be, take pride in what you’re doing. I think we’ve got a really well-balanced group with eight seniors that just love playing together and just genuinely do a good job of understanding what our standard is and everything as far as that goes.”
Ross had 11 players see time on the court and nine of them hit the scoring column.
“We did a good job of being unselfish and making some extra passes,” Lane said. “I think we did a very good job of sharing the ball, and that’s a testament to these guys not caring who scores, not caring who gets the credit — understanding what our ultimate goal is. They play extremely, extremely hard, and that’s one thing we’ve been harping on.”
Hendricks said the focus was to shut down Talawanda senior guard Cale Leitch, who averaged 15.1 points a game last season. Ross held Leitch scoreless on Saturday.
“He’s a great player, and we did a really good job shutting him down,” Hendricks said. “We got a good win as a team.”
Talawanda (0-2) was led by senior Sam Lippmann, who scored a team-high 11 points. Connor Pulaski had six points.
The Brave, who shot 10 of 35 (28%) on Saturday, came off a 59-32 season-opening loss to Monroe on Wednesday in which they scored just 10 points in the first half.
“I didn’t see anything different. I didn’t see nothing different,” Brave first-year coach Rodney Parrett said. “I seen the exact same team on the floor. I told them that they can’t get into holes. You can’t get into holes like that in varsity basketball and try to dig yourself out in 16 minutes. You just can’t.
“As bad as we played on defense, and as much as they drilled the 3, they still scored 57 points,” Parrett added. “Monroe was in the 50s. When you’re holding teams to 50 points, you’ve got to be able to take advantage of that. That’s what we want to do. They’re not putting 70, 80 points on the board. We’re holding them in the 50s. That’s what we want to do. But you’ve got to finish on the other end.”
Parrett is the fourth head boys basketball coach for the current seniors at Talawanda and 13th in 16 years. The Brave have had one winning season in the last 15 seasons, recently finishing 2-21 a year ago. They visit West Clermont on Tuesday.
“The culture here is, ‘We can’t win,’” Parrett said. “That’s been the culture, and we have to get these kids to get out of that culture and get that out of their head that it’s OK with losing.”
The Rams kept the home-opening crowd on their feet by firing 9 of 24 (37%) from 3-point range. Ross returns to action at Waynesville on Friday.
“It was a really good crowd — really good home game,” Hendricks said. “We just wanted to put it away early. Last year, we had a couple games where we let teams stay in the game. We just wanted to overall put it away early, and I think we did a really good job of holding them to four first-half points. We did a good job of that.
“Our team has really good chemistry — all the seniors and stuff. I think overall as a group we just did really well,” Hendricks added. “I just want to win, so I don’t really care how much I score. Just as long as we win the game, I’m really happy.”
