Center Grove boys basketball preview

Who are these guys?”

The casual boys basketball fan will probably look at Center Grove’s roster before Wednesday’s season opener against Greenwood and utter something to that effect.

Then again, Cleveland Indians fans were saying the same — although perhaps in more colorful language — at the beginning of “Major League,” and that ragtag group of unknowns beat the mighty Yankees and won a division title.

Center Grove graduated four seniors, including an All-County guard in Landin Hacker, and will also be missing last season’s Daily Journal Player of the Year, Tayven Jackson, who is graduating in December and enrolling early at the University of Tennessee to take part in spring football practice. The group left behind is a bit short on name recognition and varsity experience.

What this group of Trojans lacks in those departments, though, it has made up for with offseason work ethic. Coach Zach Hahn has raved about the initiative his players took in making progress over the summer.

“We lost a really good core group of guys last year with four seniors and then Tayven leaving early for Tennessee, but the group that we have coming back reminds me a lot of last year,” Hahn said. “This was the best offseason that I’ve had since I’ve been here, from the standpoint of guys are getting in the gym on their own, and they’re working individually — and they also pulled other guys with them in the gym, which is what was most exciting to me.

“It wasn’t just one guy going in and shooting and working out on his own; he was grabbing three or four guys, and before you know it there was guys shooting all over the place in Center Grove every day, trying to get shots up.”

Shooting figures to be a strength for the Trojans. Hahn believes he has as many as half a dozen players capable of hitting 40 percent of their 3-point shots, led by junior Ethan McComb — who Hahn calls Center Grove’s best outside shooter since Spencer Piercefield.

Now at Indiana Wesleyan, Piercefield was a key figure on the Trojans’ 2019 semistate team, but he didn’t earn major minutes until he evolved into a shutdown defender. McComb, primarily a junior varsity player last season, took note and prepared for this season accordingly.

“(Piercefield) was definitely the one I looked up to growing up, and I wanted to replicate him,” McComb said. “I noticed his minutes picked up his last two years once he started guarding people, and obviously we can both shoot well, so that was the way I thought I could get on the court and help this year.”

McComb was one of the Trojans’ go-to offensive players during the summer, along with classmate Marcus Ankney and senior forward Jordan Vaughns.

Both put in the effort to round out their games in the offseason.

“We’re in the gym every day, Monday through Friday, putting 400 to 1,000 shots up every day,” Vaughns said. “I didn’t have a jump shot last year. I just developed one a couple of months ago because I was in the gym with these guys.”

Hahn calls Ankney “a special player” who is capable of big-time scoring outbursts, but Ankney, who has spent plenty of time in the point guard role, still sees himself as a facilitator for others, too.

“I can make plays and get people open, especially Ethan and Jordan,” Ankney said. “Jordan for dumpoffs if he sets a screen for me, and Ethan if I drive past my man and kick for a 3. I trust these guys to hit a shot or go get an and-one.”

Despite the personnel changes and the relative lack of buzz from outside, Center Grove knows that it’s always going to have a target on its back in Johnson County, where every other school seems determined to take down the local Goliath. To a man, the Trojans are embracing those challenges.

Hahn, likewise, has not lowered his expectations at all, and he’s excited to see what this for-now anonymous group can do.

“This is now year eight, and I pretty much know where I think our gauge is and what we can do,” he said. “This is as good a team as I’ve had, if they play the right kind of basketball.”