After an ugly 67-29 setback to Greenwood in the Johnson County tournament back on Jan. 14, the Edinburgh boys basketball team decided it had had enough.
“We have a lot of competitive kids,” Lancers coach Keith Witty said, “and they don’t like to lose.”
So back to the drawing board it was. The squad had 10 days after that county defeat to get ready for a Southwestern team that had won the season opener between the two teams by 20 points, and it took full advantage.
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Edinburgh’s 61-49 payback win over the Spartans was the first sign that all of the growing pains endured during a rocky 6-18 campaign were going to pay dividends down the road.
“I felt like we took a serious step in the right direction at practice, kind of switched some things up, changed it around, and then that game was the first big win of the year for us,” junior forward Travis Jones said. “I feel like after that, we kind of just built off of that.”
The momentum that started to build slowly toward the end of last season — first with that Southwestern victory and then with a sectional win over a Trinity Lutheran team they had lost to just two weeks prior — has snowballed early on this winter as the Lancers have stormed out to a 5-0 start. That’s something that hasn’t happened at Edinburgh since the 1979-80 season; even the 2012 semistate team didn’t do it.
The struggles that these same players endured last season, when both seniors on the roster quit and very few experienced players remained, forced some underclassmen to grow up a little more quickly than they might have had to under normal circumstances.
“Taking some of the beatings that we took, it kind of lit a fire under us and showed the younger guys what it takes to be successful at the next level of varsity basketball,” Jones added.
“Last year, I don’t think we played as a team as much,” sophomore Caleb Dewey added. “It kind of made us realize that we need each other more than we think we do.”
Perhaps just as important as the experience this team gained is the confidence that it has developed. The late-season victories over Southwestern and Trinity Lutheran helped grow that — as did some offseason growth spurts. Riley Palmeter, 5-foot-11 a year ago, is now 6-3. Dewey and Jones, the team’s two leading scorers, have each grown and inch or so and now stand 6-3 and 6-4, respectively.
The best picture of how far Edinburgh has come in a year was painted on Nov. 28, when the Lancers hosted the same Indian Creek team that had run them out of the gym in an 86-30 laugher last season. Witty’s squad turned the tables in a big way, with a buzzer-beating jumper from senior Chase Littlejohn providing the decisive points in a 51-50 triumph.
Even after the Braves rallied to take the lead down the stretch, the Lancers’ confidence remained unshakeable — so much so that they were able to get the winning bucket even after their planned first option wasn’t available.
“We had drawn up a play, and it had basically said give the ball to Caleb,” senior guard Isaac Roberts recalled. “The way they set up their defense, he didn’t have anything from where he was standing, so I just caught the ball and tried to bring in the defense and make a play — and it was a pretty bad pass (to Littlejohn), but it worked out in the end.”
Much of Edinburgh’s strength lies in the fact that it doesn’t need to lean on any one person to make plays. Dewey, Jones, junior Noah Detling and Roberts each score between nine and 14 points a game, and Palmeter and Littlejohn have both proven themselves capable of delivering when called upon.
Witty says that while long-term goals for this season haven’t explicitly been discussed, his players have been asking him how they compare to his first Edinburgh team, which won 17 games and a sectional championship in 2017-18.
As chance would have it, that group was also coming off of a 6-18 season. This one believes it can pull off a similar turnaround.
“We’re 100 percent confident that we’re going to go and claim a sectional title this year, and possibly a regional title,” Roberts said.
Witty isn’t willing to make such bold proclamations just yet, but he believes all of the lofty goals the Lancers are setting for themselves are well within reach.
“It just depends on them staying focused in on what we need to do, and them coming in every game ready to compete,” Witty said. “They want to have a huge year; they want to make a name for themselves. … It’s their chance to etch their names in here at Edinburgh.”
