Versailles point guard Drake Ahrens goes hard to the basket in the second quarter and is fouled by St. Henry’s Max Delzeith. If Ahrens wasn’t trying to score, he was finding an open teammate. (Press Pros Feature Photos by Jeff Gilbert)
Drake Ahrens piled up the assists, points and steals to lead the Tigers to a 19-point lead, then led the final response to St. Henry’s big third-quarter comeback.
Versailles, OH – Drake Ahrens – unselfish seer of the floor – can’t anticipate everything before it happens.
Open teammates? Yes. He sees those split-second opportunities coming.
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But all Ahrens, his Versailles teammates and coaches hoped for Friday night couldn’t be known for sure until the basketball was tipped against St. Henry. How would they respond to a five-point, low-energy loss to Anna their last time out?
Veteran columnist Jeff Gilbert writes Ohio State football and basketball and OHSAA sports for Press Pros Magazine.com.
Ahrens, though he was confident, couldn’t foresee a high-energy, efficient start that created a 19-point lead for the Tigers in a game that was supposed to be close. He certainly didn’t expect a 17-2 St. Henry comeback in the second half that cut the lead to two.
But he knows one thing that leads to his team winning. “When our energy is high, then we win games,” Ahrens said.
Energy never lacked for the Tigers, especially when they had to regain their footing in the fourth quarter to secure a fast-paced 59-54 Midwest Athletic Conference victory. Versailles (14-5, 6-2 MAC) and St. Henry (13-6, 5-4) showed how evenly matched they were.
“We just had to keep our heads high and just have energy and keep going,” Ahrens said. “And that’s what we did. We obviously scored when we wanted to, and that’s how we won the game. And we just stayed disciplined on the defensive side.”
Of all the plays Ahrens made that led to points, perhaps his most important one for momentum’s sake came almost halfway into the fourth quarter. He grabbed a defensive rebound, dribble down the middle of the floor and missed a contested layup.
But that energy Ahrens talked about bailed him out. He grabbed the rebound away from two St. Henry players and scored. The Tigers were six points into an eight-point run and on their way to building the lead back to 10.
Going hard to the basket was a common sight. Versailles’ Blake Monnin draws a blocking foul from St. Henry’s Brayden Heath in the first half.
“We just weren’t playing the way we wanted to, so we just had to have integrity and just get back on our feet there and win the game,” Ahrens said. “I feel like we can beat anybody like that, but we just got to keep our foot on the pedal.”
Ahrens’ point-guard fingerprints were all over the game, and it started with his bull’s-eye passing. He repeatedly found the open man like the sun finds the horizon – without fail. And many times, against the Redskins, Ahrens’ passes painted a picture as pretty as a sunrise.
Unofficially, Ahrens finished with 14 assists. He whistled left-handed passes past the Redskins from above the 3-point arc to under the basket for layups. He caught passes in the lane and found cutters on the baseline that no one else saw coming.
“I just love passing to the guys to get them some shots – I can see the court,” Ahrens said. “Guys know if the guy’s over playing, they go back door and I’ll see them every time and they’ll put it in.”
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Ahrens assisted on six of the Tigers’ eight first-quarter field goals, including the first three, finding teammates for layups. The first interruption was his own layup off the first of his four first-half steals.
“We were giving him too much space and let him get on his left hand,” St. Henry coach Eric Rosenbeck said. “He can really snap with his left hand as well as anyone in the area. You have to get him on his right hand. Not that he can’t do it, it’s just not nearly as potent as his left.”
Ahrens’ touch pass from the paint to Ethan Wilker made for an 18-8 lead after the first quarter. In the second quarter, Ahrens ended up on the floor in the paint but still found 6-foot-8 Maddox Stonebraker (15 points) open in the corner for a 3-pointer. Finally, Ahrens’ fastball from the left side of the top of the key to Kade Schwartz underneath the right side of the basket put the Redskins up 35-24 at halftime. Including a free throw that followed an assist and an assist on a 3-pointer, Ahrens’ eight first-half assists and 11 points accounted for 29 points.
In the middle of St. Henry’s third-quarter comeback, Ahrens fired a one-arm special to Stonebraker on a baseline cut for an easy two. After a Redskins’ free throw opened the fourth quarter and trimmed the Tigers’ lead to 46-44, Ahrens found Wilker open for another easy two to start an 8-0 run.
St. Henry’s Jack Huelsman finds the paint past Versailles’ Blake Monnin and looks for an open teammate.
Ahrens doesn’t know how to explain his knack for seeing what others don’t.
“It’s more natural than anything,” he said and shrugged his shoulders.
Ahrens also scored 17 points, but that’s not the stat he cares the most about.
“I like passing more than anything,” he said.
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Versailles coach Travis Swank said he thinks the school assist record is 14. When he watches the game film, he will be counting the assists to get an official count.
“He’s got a knack for getting the ball to the open guy,” Swank said. “He’s always had that ability. That’s why we’ve given the keys to the castle from day one because we knew he had an elite ability.”
Ahrens’ passing and defensive intensity, fueled by a mixing of man-to-man and zone defenses in the first half created the 19-point lead.
St. Henry’s Keith Siefring looks for an angle to the basket against Versailles’ Reed Raterman during the Redskins’ third-quarter comeback.
“It started with our defensive energy,” Swank said. “We were on point from the get go.”
Ahrens turned three steals into points and got a dunk off another by Reed Raterman. But St. Henry got some steals to fuel their comeback. Live-ball turnovers, in bunches, were as popular as the pregame popcorn.
“Quite honestly, I loved our energy, I loved our juice,” Rosenbeck said. “We had a couple of more turnovers than I would have liked, and so next thing you know they have a half with 35 points.”
The Redskins might have been too far gone at halftime had it not been for Charlie Werling scoring 12 of his 17 points in the second quarter, all on 3-pointers. He made three straight to cut the lead from 27-8 to 27-17. After Stonebraker made two straight for the Tigers, Werling added another in the final minute.
“Charlie’s as clutch as they come – he’s an absolute stud,” Rosenbeck said. “All these guys, I love them to death. That’s what hurts so bad when you have a team that you love, you never want to see them hurt from sustaining a loss in the game.”
During the Redskins’ third-quarter rally, they forced turnovers and attacked the basket to put the Tigers on the defensive.
Drake Ahrens dunks to start the second quarter for his second basket courtesy of a steal by Reed Raterman.
“Energy was fantastic,” Rosenbeck said. “Keith Siefring along with Jack Huelsman we extended the two-three a little bit. I thought those guys were dynamite up there.”
However, the comeback and high energy was no moral victory for Rosenbeck, whose team has lost two straight and plays three more times before they enter the Division VI tournament as a likely No. 2 seed behind Marion Local.
“The next three games will tell us what type of sign this is,” he said. “We’ve lost two to teams that we think we can, we know we can beat. But you only get one chance in high school basketball. You got to cash that in. I know they’ll respond.”
Coming off the Anna loss, Swank missed practice Monday and Tuesday for the first time with the flu. But he said his assistants got a good start on getting the team ready. And the result was a good step toward being tournament ready.
“We rose up and grew up a little bit here tonight,” he said. “We just bought in to, ‘Hey, we can do this. We think we’re still a really, really good team, and let’s just come out and play as hard as we can every single night.’”
In the final minute, the Redskins had opportunities at the foul line but didn’t make enough. Werling cut the lead to 57-54 on a free throw with 12 seconds left. The Redskins fouled Ahrens with nine seconds left. He made both free throws for the final margin.
But before he could shoot them, a trainer had to wash blood off his jersey.
Not even Ahrens saw that coming.
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