Clay County totally represented in regional games

Mar. 7—Several times in the past, two high school basketball teams from Clay County have reached the regional level of the IHSAA basketball boys state tournament.

Clay City and Brazil both won sectional championships in 1974 and 1976 — the Eels reaching the semistate 50 years ago — but those pairings left out Staunton (sectional titles in 1975 and 1977) and Van Buren (only three sectional championships, from 1978 through 1980). Brazil and Van Buren were both winners in 1980, but the Eels and Yellow Jackets were left out.

After school consolidation, Clay City won sectionals from 2012-2015 and Northview got wins in 2016 and 2017, but the two never won at the same time.

Until this year.

For apparently the first time in Indiana High School Athletic Association history, all of Clay County will be involved in regional play on Saturday.

Clay City, ranked fifth in Class A, will play eighth-ranked Bethesda Christian in a 1 p.m. game at Washington. Northview, unranked in Class 3A, meets third-ranked Danville at 7 p.m. at Lebanon.

The Knights are meeting Danville — which spent quite a bit of time ranked first in the state — for the second time, having lost 79-58 to the Warriors back on Feb. 7. But the ridiculously young Knights, who will probably start two freshmen and a sophomore, see ways they can reverse that outcome.

For one thing, that game a month ago seems to have set the Knights on a good path. They've won seven of eight games since then, including the last six, and the one loss came in a close road game in which two Northview starters were unavailable.

"We're on a roll right now," sophomore point guard Brayden Goff said this week. "We're playing together and playing our best basketball of the season. We all believe we can win [this Saturday]."

The Warriors, coached by former Riverton Parke mentor Brian Barber, are big, with 6-foot-7, 230-pound future Indiana University lineman Evan Lawrence the biggest challenge.

"It's a typical Barber team: tough, physical, a team that attacks the rim," coach Shawn Nevill of the Knights this week. "[We'll need] our best game for sure."

But ...

"I like how we're playing," Nevill continued. "This group just wants to win ... team-first kids. Anything that can help us win, they're all in."

"We didn't rebound very well [in the February game]," Goff recalled, "but we've got that figured out. And we didn't seem to have much energy that night. In a regional championship game? We know the energy will be there.

"We've all matured now," continued the 10th-grader who is still one of the more experienced players on his team. "We've started to realize what it takes to win in varsity basketball.

"It's fun when you win. It's fun when you figure stuff out."

Even when the Knights were losing five of their first six games, Nevill was rarely disappointed at how they were playing.

"I think every team we've played has left saying '[the Knights] play really hard,' " the coach said. "This week we're focusing on getting stops, and we have to rebound — one and done. But I think we're better than we were [on Feb. 7], and we have a shot to give ourselves a chance to win."

The Eels have been ranked all season and, probably the first time, were considered the favorite when they played the Knights in the county rivalry game three weeks ago (although that was during Northview's six-game winning streak). They've won five in a row since the loss to the Knights, but Bethesda Christian has won 15 straight.

"They're very athletic and they score from all levels," coach Chris Ames said of the Patriots this week. "They have a 6-8 kid [Cooper Jackson, a new arrival to a team that was a sectional champion a year ago] in the middle, a very physical player ... they have a lot of athletes they can interchange, which makes it tough if you don't take care of the ball."

In some ways, Clay City is even younger than Northview. The Knights have a starting senior, Josh Fowler, while the Eels — as deep a team as a school their size can ever hope to be — have a nine-player rotation that includes seven juniors, a sophomore and a freshman, with two seniors also available.

"We've got a lot of guys who are very competitive kids, and competition breeds competition," Ames said. "They're a group of kids who come to work every day, and we have a great coaching staff too ... [the Eels] accept their roles, and they cheer for each other."

Junior point guard Wyatt Johnson didn't promise a victory for Clay City on Saturday, but he said, "I definitely think we're gonna go in there [to the Hatchet House] and compete.

"We're a tight group, and we know what we have to do," Johnson continued, "and defense is where it's at."

Clay City is not only deep, it's tall. More than half the team seems to be 6-4.

Asked what his team does well, Johnson said, "Sharing the ball, getting it to guys who need to get the ball. We have some of the best bigs in the [SouthWestern Indiana Athletic Conference] and we can control the pace of the game.

"We're going in level-headed and focusing on what we need to do."