Longmont comes up just short
Trojans play No. 3 Windsor tough at Class 5A state quarterfinals
DENVER >> With less than two minutes left in Longmont boys basketball’s 2022-23 season, junior point guard Cole Corner did what Cole Corner does best.
He drained a 3-pointer that would give heart palpitations to any March Madness fan, pulling the 11th-seeded Trojans within two points of No. 3 Windsor in crunch time of their Class 5A Great 8 contest at the Denver Coliseum.
Senior shooting guard Kaden Rose added to the excitement with 13.1 seconds on the clock, netting a layup to bring the Trojans back within a couple. The Wizards, however, rode a strong rebounding performance all the way to the Final Four, taking down Longmont 62-56.
“I’m so proud. We’ve worked so hard,” Corner said. “We bought into the coaching and everything. We just fell short at the last second. We put everything into it.”
Corner led his boys with 23 points, shooting 56% from behind the arc, as senior shooting guard Reese Pearson added another 11 from every spot on the floor. The Wizards ended the game with 31 boards, including 12 on the offensive end, compared to the 17 total from Longmont.
Four free throws from Windsor’s Clayton Wright and Madden Smiley in the last 12 seconds put an end to a whirlwind season for the Trojans, who after losing major producers in graduates Keegan Patterson and Brendan Barcewski, calling most of their junior varsity squad up from the minors, and beginning the year with key injuries, somehow still found a way to make it to the Coliseum.
That 1-4 team in mid-december couldn’t have dreamt it. But that’s just Jeff Kloster basketball. The
legendary coach, who surpassed the 500-win mark during last year’s 4A tournament run, hasn’t stopped wowing on the state stage.
“It just shows how hard we’ve worked and how much we’ve bought into the coaching. The coaches have done so much for us and we just finally bought in in the last three, four weeks of the season,” Corner said. “Once we started buying in, we started seeing success with a (six)game win streak when we first beat Windsor (on Jan. 11). And then we got some confidence and we started feeling ourselves.”
The Trojans began the game lighting up the basket as they floated and faded away toward an early advantage over the Wizards. Windsor, however, was never far behind, erasing a 14-8 deficit and turning it into a 15-14 lead near the end of the first quarter.
The two squads maintained that intensity throughout the rest of the first half — and, really, the entire game — as Longmont took a slight 30-29 edge at the midway point. Then Windsor shifted the momentum in its favor.
Despite constant pushback from the Trojans, with three ties and two lead changes in the third quarter alone, Longmont couldn’t turn the tides back into its own favor. When
Corner buried a 3 with 6:25 left in the fourth, Windsor responded with a sevenpoint run.
Longmont
The Trojans, who will be saying goodbye to seniors Rose, Pearson, forward Bau Brush, shooting guard Conner Dickey and center Noah Atherton, ended their year with an 18-8 record, thanks in large part to that sixgame winning streak that changed the course of the season.
“I love every senior,” coach Kloster said. “We knew at the beginning of the season that we had so many kids that were moving up from the junior varsity level and it was going to be a matter of trying to get them to understand what a varsity game was all about. And they embraced it. They practiced hard every day. We enjoyed them. That’s the thing that I love as a coach. It was great to be in the gym with them every day. What we asked of them, they always attempted to do. I’m very proud of them.”
couldn’t
recover.