‘New’ Worthington Christian set for Division III semifinal
This year's edition of the Worthington Christian boys basketball team doesn't look much like what fans have come to expect from the Warriors over the past 30 years.
No one knows that better than their coach, Kevin Weakley.
In the early 1990s, Weakley was the point guard at Worthington Christian under legendary coach Ray Slagle, who employed a style of basketball based heavily on shooting a barrage of threepointers. The three-point line had come to the high school level three years earlier and Slagle was one of the first coaches in Ohio to firmly embrace shooting from beyond the arc.
“He got the ball rolling in central Ohio and probably around our state in terms of shooting the three-point shot,” Weakley said. “I remember having games where we would shoot 35, 40 threes. We had games where we made 17 or 18 threes in a game and kind of adopted that style. At that time, not a lot of teams did that.”
Weakley was a junior in 1994 when the Warriors made the Division IV state title game. They won their lone championship in 1999, one year before Slagle left for Cedarville University and Weakley returned to his alma mater as head coach.
Although Weakley describes himself as a mutt in his coaching style — taking things he learned from his father, Scott, who also coached at Worthington Christian, in addition to Slagle and his college coach at Otterbein, Dick Reynolds — for much of the past 20 years, the Warriors generally have played fairly similarly to what Slagle pioneered.
That's not the case this year.
“We're a little bit of an atypical team,” Weakley said. “We've got great size and athleticism and two tremendous high school guards who can really create off the dribble. We're more of a basket attack, pound-it-into-the-post-type team.
“We're really hard to guard in the halfcourt because of our size and our ability to put it on the floor and score in the post, and then we're just a bear to score on defensively because we can oftentimes put lineups of guys that are 6foot-3 to 6-foot-6 on the floor.”
It may be a style that's nontraditional for the Warriors, given their history, but it has worked. Worthington Christian (26-1) is back in the state tournament for the first time since 2008 heading into Friday's Division III semifinal against Cincinnati Taft at University of Dayton Arena.
The Warriors' starting lineup, led by junior point guard D.J. Moore, who averages 17.8 points per game, is all 6-3 and taller.
That size that makes this team so effective around the basket — and hard to score on. Moore agrees that size and length are a team strength.
“That really has helped us win a lot of games this year, being able to be a little bigger than a lot of teams, being able to get rebounds and boards,” he said. “Having bigs that can really play and get out on the floor helps us a lot.”
And though this year's Worthington Christian team is nontraditional for the Warriors, Weakley and Moore believe that maximizing this team's strengths can help them win their first state title at the Division III level.
“Some people in our community, they've made comments over the course of the season that this isn't the typical Worthington Christian team,” Weakley said. “I've read that in some ways as being negative, but I don't look at it in that way at all. We've been blessed to have these kids who have different gifts and abilities, and we have a very unique team with a lot of different parts that complement each other.” bjohnson@dispatch.com @baileyajohnson_
Winning your NCAA Tournament bracket pool can be contingent on making smart picks. But the smartest picks aren't just making a No. 1 seed your national champion – you know, since everyone is probably picking Gonzaga or Baylor or Illinois (sorry, Michigan).
The first round is where all the decisive picks can separate your bracket from the pack, and the best way to win the first round is by selecting the right upsets and being a little gutsy. Every year, there's a handful of them that nobody saw coming (ahem, No. 16 seed UMBC over No. 1 Virginia last year). But then there are the ones where you can essentially see the writing on the wall.
Here's a look at the four best bets for bracket-busting by double-digit seeds:
No. 12 Winthrop over No. 5 Villanova
The No. 12 seed-over-no. 5 seed is the most predictable upset – there have been 50 upsets by No. 12 seeds since 1985 with 36% odds – and it's even more the case in this particular matchup in the South Region.
That's because the Wildcats (16-6) are extremely susceptible after losing top player Collin Gillespie, the Big East co-player of the year, this March. Coach Jay Wright's team has a scattered identity at the worst possible time, and it showed in a Big East Tournament upset to Georgetown.
But this is also the perfect storm because Winthrop has Cinderella written all over it as a No. 12. The Eagles (23-1) only lost once this year while dominating the Big South Conference. Led by 6-7 senior guard Chandler Vaudrin (12.2 ppg, 7.2 rpg, 6.9 apg, 1.3 spg) this team has the key ingredients for a mid-major bracket-buster.
No. 11 Michigan State over UCLA, then No. 6 Brigham Young
Consider the fact that the Spartans (15-12, 9-11 Big Ten) beat No. 1 seeds Illinois and Michigan in the last three weeks, and that's evidence of how good coach Tom Izzo's squad can be when it plays up to its potential.
While there's a reason Michigan State was on the bubble and facing UCLA in a play-in game, these matchups favor the Spartans.
Michigan State is playing better than a UCLA team that's lost its last four and trending backwards in March.
Against BYU, the second-place finisher to Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference, MSU can rely on its athleticism to throw the Cougars (20-6) out of their offensive rhythm.
No. 12 Uc-santa Barbara over No. 5 Creighton
The Big West champion Gauchos (22-4) are the real deal as a giant killer candidate. Coach Joe Pasternack has this team playing great defense, ranking 19th nationally in points allowed to opponents. They also shoot at a high rate, ranking 20th nationally at 49% field goal percentage.
Senior guard Jaquori Mclaughlin (16.2 ppg, 41% three-point shooting) paces a balanced offense. UCSB faces a Creighton team that was a preseason top 10 team but isn't exactly thriving as a No. 5 seed.
The Bluejays (20-8) lost by 25 points in the Big East Tournament final to Georgetown and recently dealt with in-house adversity, as coach Greg Mcdermott was suspended one game for a racially insensitive speech that prompted team members to speak out against him.
No. 14 Colgate over No. 3 Arkansas
Unlike the other three matchups, this upset pick has less to do with the better-seeded team struggling. That's because Arkansas (22-6) is thriving, having won nine in a row before it fell to LSU in the SEC Tournament final.
The upset pick has much more to do with an underrated Colgate team that's poised to be a darling in this March Madness.