Center Grove’s Peyton Byrd hoists the regional championship trophy following Saturday’s regional win over Franklin.
Chris Williams | For the Daily Journal
INDIANAPOLIS
When six of your seven rotation players are seniors, it takes a lot more than an early nine-point deficit to set off panic alarms. Especially when your opponent is giving away about three inches at every position.
Center Grove weathered an early storm against rival Franklin, using its superior size to will its way to a 68-56 victory in a Class 4A regional clash at Southport on Saturday evening. The ninth-ranked Trojans (21-4) advance to this Saturday’s New Castle Semistate for a 10 a.m. semifinal against Ben Davis.
“Honestly, we’re huge,” Center Grove senior guard Jalen Bundy said, “so what are you going to do? Put a 6-2 dude on a 6-6 guy? So we’ve just got to use that to our advantage. Our game plan was pretty much to kill them in the paint, and that’s what we did.”
The Grizzly Cubs stunned the Trojans in the opening minutes, with 3-pointers from Grant Hunter and Micah Davis serving as the bookends of a 9-0 run over the first 3:42 of play. Bundy helped settle Center Grove down by scoring the next six points, and the Trojans closed the quarter with eight straight — 3-pointers from Bundy and Joey Schmitz and a layup by Michael Ephraim — to take their first lead at 17-15.
“We were struggling at the beginning, not rebounding, doing a lot of stuff,” Bundy said. “But I knew as soon as we settled in — it was probably some nervousness — as soon as we settled in and hit some shots, we were going to be fine.”
In the second period, Center Grove started putting its size to work, hunting mismatches on the block. The strategy helped start to create a little separation, with post buckets from Ephraim and Schmitz pushing the lead to 30-23. The Grizzly Cubs, meanwhile, had difficulty generating points at the other end, scoring just eight points in the quarter and none over the final 3:18 of the half.
After making three 3-pointers in the first period, Franklin didn’t hit another until the 4:46 mark of the fourth.
“Sometimes it’s a make or miss type of game, and that was one of them,” Franklin coach Adrian Moss said. “We got lots of open looks; if we make those, I think it’s a new game.”
A Bundy 3 put the Trojans up by double digits at 38-27 with 4:51 left in the third quarter. Franklin fought back to within seven on a couple of occasions, but Center Grove had answers for every would-be run, getting a pair of transition dunks from Peyton Byrd to get the lead back to 48-38 heading into the last eight minutes. A putback basket by Ben Chestnut and a Byrd drive made the margin 14 with 5:36 to go in the game.
Byrd scored all of his 16 points in the second half, almost all of them after starting big man Will Spellman went down with an apparent ankle injury with about three minutes left in the third quarter. Byrd and fellow 6-foot-7 senior Chestnut combined for 19 points from that point, including a big corner 3 from Chestnut to extend the lead back to 10 right after Spellman got hurt.
“We had to have people step up, and (Chestnut) came up huge in the sometimes and on the boards,” Byrd said. “Will’s a big piece; we had people step up, and that’s what it takes.”
Center Grove coach Zach Hahn said after the game that he expects Spellman to be fine by semistate time.
“All of our guys are banged up,” he said. “Every team in the state is banged up, so you’ve just got to go home, get healthy, and get ready for next week.”
Franklin (18-5) rallied, with a pair of Wyatt Nickleson 3-pointers and a Ryder Street follow-up trimming the deficit to 59-54 with 1:41 remaining. But Center Grove weathered the storm and delivered the kill shot when Byrd dunked and got fouled at the 1:15 mark.
Bundy added two free throws and a layup in the final minute, and Byrd added an exclamation-point dunk in the closing seconds to ice it.
Davis scored a game-high 21 points for Franklin, but a Center Grove defensive effort spearheaded by Bundy and Byrd made the Eastern Kentucky recruit earn every one of them.
“We just did a good enough job staying in front,” Hahn said of his team’s defense on Davis. “Everything was contested runners, so I thought we did an excellent job defensively keeping him in front.”
“They did it as a team,” Moss said. “I don’t think there’s one individual, no matter how long you are — especially if Micah gets his jump shot going — but they loaded up on him. … I thought they had a good game plan. They did the same thing East Central did (in the sectional final) — they loaded up in the paint on Micah and hoped that we missed shots, and we missed shots again tonight.”
Bundy finished with 18 points to lead a balanced offensive attack for the Trojans, with Byrd and Schmitz (15) joining him in double digits. Ephraim had nine points and Chestnut added eight off the bench.
Nickleson finished with 13 and Kolt Nelson eight for the Grizzly Cubs, who will also graduate four starters and six of the seven players who saw action Saturday. That group grew up over the last three seasons with Moss, who’s going to have a difficult time saying goodbye but remains proud of each of them.
“I’ve been in that locker room multiple times where I didn’t get to where I wanted to get,” the coach said. “My thing I always go back to — you want to be able to go look yourself in the mirror and say that … I gave everything that I could give to this team and to this program, for myself and for my family, and at the end of the day, if you did that, you can live with the results.”
The results have been pretty good lately for Center Grove, which has now won 15 in a row since a one-point overtime loss to No. 1 Fishers on Dec. 22.
That narrow defeat, Bundy says, has pushed the Trojans ever since.
“We were up nine going into the fourth,” he recalled. “If we would have just hit free throws, we would have won that game, and honestly, that gave us confidence to play with the No. 1 team in the state, so that means we can play with anybody.”
