KETTERING — Neither the roadblock life unexpectedly put in their path or the on-court challenge of a formidable opponent kept Perry’s boys basketball team from going where no Commodores basketball team had ever gone before Tuesday night.
With a 52-50 win over Fort Loramie in a Division IV regional semifinal on Tuesday at Trent Arena, Perry moved to within one game of playing in the state tournament for the first time.
The Commodores will face Cincinnati Christian at 7 p.m. Friday night for a trip to the state tournament after it defeated Tri-Village 49-42 in Tuesday night’s other regional semifinal.
The Commodores (23-3) built an 18-point lead three minutes into the third quarter then held off a late Fort Loramie surge that brought the Redskins to within four points, 46-42, with 3:10 left in the game.
Orion Monford, who hit his first seven shots, led Perry with 20 points. Jakoby Lane-Harvey had 11 points, 8 assists and 7 steals, and Kobe Glover scored 10 points, eight of them in the second half.
Fort Loramie (21-6) got 18 points from Dillon Braun and 10 from Tyler Siegel.
“I think the biggest keys were our energy and our defense. The energy we brought into this game was crazy,” Lane-Harvey said. “The energy was high.”
Perry’s victory came just a day after the death of assistant coach Herb Lane in a car crash on his way home after practice on Monday.
The Commodores remembered him by wearing warm-up shirts with his picture and “Coach Lane” on them. And one of the shirts was draped over the chair next to coach Matt Tabler’s throughout the game.
“There is a cliché of family out there, but they truly are family. They stuck together,” Tabler said.
“We pulled them in at 10:30 this morning. We had a team meeting. We had three ministers there. They prayed with us and we just talked about life and everything like that. We had the administration in there as well and then Coach Lane’s dad came in and talked to us and said Coach Lane would really want you to play.
“I think that was the final thing right there because then we voted as a team and they all decided they wanted to play this evening,” he said.
Lane-Harvey said, “It was a lot of adversity but we did all this for him (Lane). We’re looking forward to the next game. We’re going to keep it going.
“This team is so close. We all bonded together and came to one house last night to make sure we all went to sleep at the right time so we didn’t have any excuses and we got the win,” he said.
Glover said, “We all had to clear our minds, get away from it and stay focused and go out there and play Perry basketball. We didn’t let the emotions get too high or too low and we went out there and did what we had to do.”
Perry led 13-11 after one quarter and was up 30-21 at halftime. When the Commodores hit their first five shots in the second half, they expanded the lead to 18 points, 42-24, with 4½ minutes left in the third quarter.
But, with the help of six 3-pointers in the final 12 minutes and a Perry offensive drought that produced only two points in an eight-minute span, Fort Loramie got back into the game.
But when Perry got the lead back to seven points, 52-45 with less than 30 seconds to play, the Commodores were in control again. It was a four-point game just before time ran out when Perry stepped back and allowed Fort Loramie to hit an uncontested lay-up.
A year ago on the same court, Perry built a 12-point lead in the first half against Yellow Springs in a regional semifinal before ending up on the wrong side of a 61-43 loss. It was the first time Perry had ever played in a boys basketball regional.
This time, a year older, more experienced and more tournament tested, they got what they were looking for.
“Our coaches say the fourth quarter makes a man,” Lane-Harvey said. “The difference is we’ve got six seniors out there this year.”
Tabler said, “They worked very hard to get back to this point where a lot of people said they couldn’t. I feel as though our experience helped us. I was just proud of our kids that they kept fighting and fighting until the final buzzer.”
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