Scott County Central boys win fourth consecutive state basketball title

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Get it.

That's what Scott County Central coach Kenyon Wright told senior LaMarcus Steward before teammate Antonio Johnson shot a free throw with 2 minutes, 51 seconds left in the Class 1 state championship game Saturday at Mizzou Arena.

Steward got it. It was a rebound that his coach demanded he get, and it helped make the difference in the Braves' 79-72 victory over Drexel.

It helped SCC win its fourth consecutive state championship. It helped the Braves win their record 16th title overall.

It was one of just two rebounds Steward got the whole game, and it was part of a sequence for the Braves that, to speak colloquially, was huge.

State championship huge.

The Braves' lead, which had been as big as 13 points, had shrunk to four just seconds earlier.

It looked like Drexel would have the momentum as the final minutes of the season ticked off the clock.

Senior Dominique Porter missed a shot with 2 minutes, 55 seconds to go. He grabbed his own rebound but missed again a few seconds later.

That's when unheralded senior Antonio Johnson, who played 31 minutes Saturday, fought for and won the next rebound. He floated a shot in and was fouled.

That's when Wright looked to Steward, just before Johnson shot his free throw.

"That was a big rebound for me," Steward said. "Coach just looked at me and said, 'Get it.'

"When he told me, I knew he was serious, so I had to get the rebound. If there wasn't no rebound, I don't know what he would've did to me."

Johnson missed. Steward rebounded and scored, and the Bobcats, who at one point had drawn within a single basket, never again trailed by fewer than seven points.

"That got us two rebounds and we outrebounded them by three," Wright said. "That got us two of them right there."

"I'm telling you right now, I told him before the game," Wright said before pausing and looking at sophomore guard Larandis Banks standing next to him. "You can ask him right here," said Wright, motioning to Banks. "What was the No. 1 goal?"

Banks: "Rebounding."

After a nod, Wright added, "And they did it."

That wasn't always the case. Drexel was outrebounding SCC by 10 at one point in the first half, and the Bobcats led by as many as seven points in the first quarter.

The Braves ended up winning the rebounding battle 39-36.

"We kind of read where the ball was going," said Porter after being asked how SCC had erased that rebounding deficit. "Just tried to box out the cutters and stuff that were coming in trying to rebound hard. Just put a butt on them and just box them out. And then the ball just came to us. Just battling."

SCC led 4-2 early in the contest but did not take another lead until 2:55 left in the second quarter when Porter's jumper gave the Braves a one-point advantage.

That basket proved to be the start of an 11-0 run for SCC, which led 38-27 at halftime.

SCC was outscored 21-14 in the third quarter. Drexel made its first run to try to get back in the game, but Wright said he did not see any panic in his players.

"They knew better," Wright said. "I told them that they would make a run. Good basketball teams do that. That kid got that dunk and they got excited and all that. But you can get excited. You can do all that. All it comes down to is when he dunked that we come down and we got two points right back."

The dunk came for Drexel junior C.J. Bolton with 5:06 left in the third quarter. It was a play that energized Drexel fans and players.

"You have to have a short memory," Wright said. "That dunk got them fired up, but when you celebrate at the end of it and you come down and get scored back on, what does it matter? That's what I tell the kids all the time. We don't celebrate. We're not fancy. You be fancy, you get beat. You can't go out there and be flashy. You've got to go out there and be tough. That's what I tried to get them to do all year, and they bought into it here at the end of the season."

Bolton scored the first 13 points of the game for the Bobcats and finished with 35 points. Wright said the Braves had to choose between slowing Bolton or the Bobcats' inside forces, including 6-foot-8 senior Chris Wilson.

"You live or die by one or the other, and luckily his 35 didn't kill us," Wright said. "We come down and we scored on them when we needed to."

Porter led SCC with 28 points and 14 rebounds in his final game with the Braves. Banks, a sophomore, added 20 points, while Steward finished with 12.

"I don't think it's a different feel for me," Wright said with Porter and Steward sitting on either side of him. "I think it's these guys right here. These guys right here was the role players last year and now these guys stepped up and took one over. And it was all these two all the way through. You can see it in the rebounds, box scores, stuff like that. These guys took over and done their job. The other kids stepped up and was their role players."

The Braves finished the title season with a 22-10 record and the championship they'd been working toward all along.

"Not a lot of people believed in them," Wright said. "I'll promise you that. Not a lot of people did. Not a lot of people after watching us this season doing things and doing this and doing that."

Wright said he turned to Porter at the end of the game and asked him about his cousin Otto Porter, who led the Braves to the last three state titles before leaving for Georgetown.

"Where's Otto?" Wright asked. "Who needs Otto? We love him, but who needs him?"

Like his older cousin, Dominique Porter finished his career with three state championships.

"I haven't wanted anything as I bad this state title," he said with more resolution than excitement.

"It feels very good," he said. "I'm just proud of everybody on this team that helped contribute. Not just the five starters or the sixth man -- I'm talking about everybody. Everybody that helped us this past year, who played as another player from a different team that helped us find out what kind of offense or what kind of defense that we're playing. I just want to thank all the juniors, the seniors, the sophomores, the freshmen -- everybody that help us get here."

And with that, the storied career of another storied Brave and Porter was complete. He started to walk back to his team's locker room but stopped and shook his head slightly before turning back.

"I'm going to miss this," he said.