Trey Sagester led all players with 17 points, scored from nearly every spot on the court. (Press Pros Feature Photos By Julie Wright-Daniel)
Tri-Village controlled every phase of the game in a 62-31 regional final win over Troy Christian. The second-ranked Patriots will face top-ranked Marion Local in the regional finals on Saturday.
Vandalia, Oh – If Tri-Village’s 25-0 record didn’t put you on notice…
Alan Brads writes OHSAA sports and sports at large for Press Pros Magazine.com.
If its 36-point win in a district title game didn’t put you on notice…
And if a 39.6-point average margin of victory didn’t put you on notice…
Then here’s one final chance: Tri-Village’s 62-31 win over Troy Christian in the regional semifinals should put you on notice.
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After clobbering Troy Christian, the Patriots have just one more turn left on the road to Dayton. They face the top-ranked Marion Local Flyers in a regional final this Saturday at Butler High School, just 13 miles north of UD Arena.
“We’re excited for the opportunity,” head coach Josh Sagester said. “We haven’t been to regional finals in a while. We’ve kinda stubbed our toe in the regional semis. It’s two good teams getting ready to play, so we’ll go back to the drawing board and put a plan together.”
The Patriots rank second in Division VI, meaning the regional champion will likely enter the final four as the favorite to win it all.
“Noah [Finkbine, RIGHT] is Noah, right?” Josh Sagester said. “Fourteen points and guarding the best player. He’s a Swiss army knife … He can be whatever we need him to be for us to win.”
It starts with senior guard Trey Sagester, who can score from anywhere. Against TC, he undershot his average scoring mark of 24.6 points with a measly 17, which led all scorers.
He prefers to launch the long ball all night long, but he can drive and score in the lane well enough to keep defenders honest. And half the battle is keeping your best defender on him – and off the bench.
Sagester drew two fouls on TC’s defensive leader, Brennan Hochwalt, in the first 90 seconds.
When the Eagles forced the Division VII Southwest District player of the year into a miss, the Patriots often put a new arrow into his quiver with an offensive rebound. They hauled in five of their first seven misses as their early edge blossomed into a double-digit lead.
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“We were some dogs early on the board,” Trey Sagester said. “Kasyn Hollinger came in and gave us great minutes. He got three offensive rebounds in a row. That sparked us.”
The Patriots opened the second quarter with a 6-0 run, all scored on the heels of offensive rebounds by Hollinger.
“Tri-Village (Dom Black-pictured) just kept coming in different directions,” Troy Christian coach Ray Zawadzki said. “Inside, outside, off a screen, off a ball screen, off a back door, a curl cut, a post up. It was like ‘How do you stop this?”
On the other end, Tri-Village allowed just two offensive rebounds.
And perhaps most frighteningly of all, they did much of that rebounding work with 6-foot-5, 290-pound center Dom Black on the bench with two fouls of his own.
Black also earned first-team all-district honors with 5.5 rebounds and 12 points per game on ultra-efficient 73.6% field goal shooting.
Despite sitting out the entire second quarter, Black surged late to rack up 13 points.
But with the imposing center sidelined, Tri-Village sought out another sidekick. They found more than one.
Senior forward Noah Finkbine scored in every quarter and totaled 14 points, including a pair of three-pointers that Troy Christian dared him to shoot by sagging off of him on the arc.
Sophomore guard Brecken Gray likewise sank two triples on the way to eight points, and Hollinger scored six points off the bench to complement his hoard of rebounds.
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“They just kept coming in different directions,” Troy Christian coach Ray Zawadzki said. “Inside, outside, off a screen, off a ball screen, off a back door, a curl cut, a post up. It was like ‘How do you stop this?’ I’m still gonna be wondering about it when I’m in Florida for the next 30 days.”
On the other side of the ball, the Patriots are no less intimidating.
“We’re excited for the opportunity,” Josh Sagester said. “We haven’t been to regional finals in a while. We’ve kinda stubbed our toe in the regional semis. It’s two good teams getting ready to play, so we’ll go back to the drawing board and put a plan together.”
They never stand idle and stay on the attack. The Patriot guards made TC’s ballhandlers permanently uncomfortable. The Eagle offense relies on good ball movement and controlled possessions to open up shooters on the perimeter. But Tri-Village seemingly disrupted one out of every two or three passes, preventing the Eagles from catching a Patriot out of position.
“We knew all their plays,” Finkbine said. “We knew their strengths and their weaknesses. We knew we had to take away the three-pointers right away, and then take away their driving lanes.”
Sophomore Eagle Austin Stangel hit a wing three 50 seconds into the game to give his team its first and final lead, 3-0. They shot more threes than twos, but only hit four more after Stengel’s opener.
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“We did a good job of running them off the three-point line and not letting them make, and quite frankly, shoot as many threes as they have during the season,” Josh Sagester said. “Numbers don’t lie, they’ve taken approximately 675 threes … The majority of their offense is outside the arc. So we felt like we needed to make them make some tough twos … And I think that kinda proved its worth today.”
Trey Sagester battles for a loose ball.
Trey Sagester led the Patriots to a 16-10 lead after a quarter while guarded primarily by Gabriel Wilkins, who relieved Hochwalt after his second early foul.
“I knew [Hochwalt] was gonna be all over me,” Trey Sagester said. “And once he got two fouls, I liked the matchup I got next.”
On defense, Black’s presence in the lane will strike fear into any would-be dribble driver or low-post player. But against TC’s three-point dependent offense, his absence didn’t hurt them like it would against, for example, Marion Local.
In fact, the Patriot defense sans-Black held the Eagles to just four points in the second quarter, while they mounted a 29-14 halftime lead.
Finkbine guarded TC’s leading scorer, Riston Taylor (17 ppg), and held him to two points in the first half, and eight in the game.
Trey Sagester leads his team in points, assists and steals, which earned him the title of Division VI Southwest District player of the year.
“Noah is Noah, right?” Josh Sagester said. “Fourteen points and guarding the best player. He’s a Swiss army knife … He can be whatever we need him to be for us to win.”
Taylor singlehandedly turned the rebound game around in the third quarter, snagging each of Tri-Village’s first four field goals on the way down. But the Patriot defense kept pestering Troy Christian, and the three-pointer wouldn’t go.
One TC shot bounced off the rim and wedged itself between the top of the backboard and the shot clock, as stuck as the Eagles’ offense.
The lead topped out at 34 points – one shy of the running clock deficit – and settled at 62-31, a perfect double.
Taylor led the Eagles with eight points, Noah Fecher added seven and Austin Stangel put up five.
Troy Christian finished the season 20-6 with its second district title in three years.
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“I was blessed with the opportunity to lead these young men,” Zawadzki said. “And I felt like we got everything out of them. I don’t know a coach who would see a district title and 20 wins and wouldn’t say, ‘Sign me up.’ We didn’t know if we were gonna be able to achieve that. But credit to these young men, they bought in, gave everything they had, loved each other and trusted each other … It’s just hard when it ends.”
Have you ever seen this before? A Troy Christian jumper got wedged on top of the backboard. It was that kind of night for the Eagles. Sign of a bad shooting night…..
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