BELLVILLE — Three sophomores in the starting lineup. Two transfers playing quality minutes. One senior left in the entire program from a team that went 20-5 and played in the district finals a year ago.
Still, Lexington opened the season with a 78-52 win at Clear Fork in a non-league boys basketball game Friday night inside a packed Colt Corral.
Youth was indeed served for Lexington coach Scott Hamilton, now 181-89 in his 12th season leading the Minutemen, the winningest coach in program history and the longest-tenured boy coach ever at the school.
Then again, when two of those sophomores are 6-foot-4 forward Brayden Fogle and 5-10 point guard Seven Allen, both All-Northwest District performers as freshmen, the Minutemen are not a normal young, high school basketball team.
The duo combined for 29 points, seven rebounds, five assists and three steals in 37 total minutes on the court Friday night in their first varsity basketball action together since Allen transferred in from Madison this fall.
The two did play together on Lexington’s football team in 2023, helping the Minutemen earn a playoff spot.
“Lexington just has some phenomenal athletes,” second-year Clear Fork coach Tim Brafford said after the game. “They’re long, we don’t have a lot of height.
“They have several people taller than any of our kids and at that point you just got to get in and play.”
Brafford’s team has seven seniors, five lettermen and three starters back from last year’s team that won six games in 2022-2023 after a winless season the year before. He has greater expectations for his squad in the Mid-Ohio Athletic Conference this season.
But he was also realistic about taking on a Lexington team picked among the favorites in the larger Ohio Cardinal Conference.
“(Lexington) plays great ball pressure. They have some great ball handlers, some great shooters. They jump out of the gym. They’re really a nice basketball club. Scott Hamilton does a great job there. He’s been there for several years and every year has a great club on the floor. I knew we would be in for a game,” Brafford said.
Lex pressure takes toll in first quarter
The Minutemen are normally a stingy defensive team, especially in the halfcourt. But Hamilton said this year’s squad offers him an opportunity to pressure the entire floor.
That man-to-man pressure created six Clear Fork turnovers and ignited a 17-3 run in the latter stages of the first quarter. It allowed Lexington to break to a strong start and take a 23-9 edge after eight minutes.
“I think in my top eight rotation, I’ve got eight guys that can defend 94 feet. So we’re going to experiment with that. If we see that we can do it and it’s to our advantage, then we’re gonna take advantage of it because of our depth and our athleticism,” Hamilton said.
“There’s a lot of things that we’re going to try to put these kids, at least early in the season, into challenging situations. We have five sophomores in the (top eight) rotation. But my ninth and 10th guys are both sophomores as well,” he said.
It’s the beginning of a long season that Hamilton hopes concludes with another solid post-season run.
“This isn’t game 22. We have got to work on things. We have got to make sure that we’re continuing to get better and doing things the way that we want to do to get ready for tomorrow, the next day.
“We have a lot of young guys, a lot of moving parts. We want to try to keep guys fresh and try to keep guys out of foul trouble. We want to play aggressive defense. Going into the locker room at halftime, we had maybe four or five guys with two fouls. That’s got to get cleaned up. We can’t be having that,” Hamilton said.
A loss, but a winning effort
Down by 14 after one quarter and 45-25 at halftime, Clear Fork never surrendered. The Colts played the Minutemen fairly evenly in the second half, only being outscored by six in the final 16 minutes.
“I was OK with everything that happened,” Brafford said.
“I love that we played until the very end. We’re down 20 points and still fighting to steal the ball. Diamond press, everyone’s still running. They were exhausted.
“The thing we need to work on is attacking the basket. I thought that we went in trying to have the referee make the call for us instead of going hard to the glass. That’s one thing that I think affected us negatively.
“We got into foul trouble. We’re not real deep. So once that happened, we had some issues,” he said.
Senior Grant Spencer, a 6-1 guard, led the Colts with 21 points, including a trio of 3-pointers.
“Grant is just a gamer. He is probably my most intelligent basketball IQ player. He sees the floor well, he knows what to do with it. He knows where to go with it and he comes to play every night. Even at the end with two minutes left, we took him out and he was upset. He wanted to go back. He’s just a competitor,” Brafford said.
Senior forward Garrett Hotz had 11 points and six rebounds in just under 15 minutes on the floor before fouling out midway through the third quarter.
Statistically speaking
Allen led Lexington with 17 points on 8-of-12 shooting from the floor. He also had four of the team’s 15 assists.
Sophomore Joe Caudill, who lettered last season as a freshman, connected on 8-of-14 shots and finished with 16 points and nine rebounds. Fogle hit fine of nine shots, scoring 12 points and grabbing six rebounds.
Junior guard Jacob Legron, who returns to Lexington this season after playing at Mansfield Senior the last two years, came off the bench and scored 15 points, including 5-for-5 at the foul line.
Lexington shot 56 percent from the floor (34-of-61) and was 10-of-17 at the line. Clear Fork was 18-of-47 from the field (38 percent) and 13-of-19 from the line.
Lexington had a 37-27 edge in rebounding and ended up committing four less turnovers than Clear Fork, 15-11. Five of the Minutemen turnovers came in the fourth quarter as Hamilton cleared his bench.
“We only had 11 turnovers, but I thought a couple of them were just lazy passes. We kind of took things for granted. Defensively, giving up 52 points is never going to make me happy. I don’t care how many we score,” Hamilton said.
Up next for both teams
Lexington has no time to rest, traveling to Clyde on Saturday night to take on the Fliers in the home team’s season opener.
Clear Fork opens MOAC play Thursday at Galion.