Jim Mashek

BOWLING GREEN TANGLES WITH ADAIR COUNTY IN OPENING ROUND ON WEDNESDAY MORNING

The ladders were brought to the court at WKU’s historic E.A. Diddle Arena, after the Bowling Green High School boys basketball team made some history of its own.

The Purples were going back to the KHSAA Sweet 16 for just the second time since the 2016-17 season, and in that one appearance, in March, 2021, veteran BGHS coach D.G. Sherrill had returned from a three-year hiatus, wanting to spend more time with his two teenage daughters.

Sherrill, the tall, personable BGHS coach has guided some terrific teams since then, but the Purples always ran into crosstown rival Warren Central High School in the KHSAA 4th Region championship game.

They came up short, each year, with the narrative changing over time.

In 2022, Warren Central coach William Unseld’s Dragons slipped past Bowling Green, 58-50, to get to the Sweet 16. The next year, Unseld directed a Team for the Ages, the Warren Central squad that stormed to a 36-1 finish and the Dragons’ second KHSAA state title in school history. But in the 4th Region championship game, reserve guard Luke Idlett got a good look at a deep 3-pointer from the right wing in the final seconds.

The shot was on target, but rimmed out, and Warren Central would escape with a 52-50 victory.

Then, last season, Bowling Green won each of its first three meetings with Warren Central, including a decisive 78-54 victory in the KHSAA’s 14th District championship game. Bowling Green had plenty of momentum going into Diddle Arena, but Kade Unseld and the Dragons rallied to claim a 64-57 victory, in overtime, to bring the Purples’ season to a screeching halt.

“The locker room was really down,” Sherrill said as the nets came down last week at Diddle, when the Purples outlasted a tough, strong Clinton County squad, 66-59, to win the 4th Region and berth in the Sweet 16. “I told our guys, ‘Remember that feeling,’ and we had a lot of guys, on this team, who played in that game. I told them, ‘You’ve got to be better on every possession, you’ve got to work harder, on every possession …

“These kids stayed in the fight. It’s a very gratifying moment.”

The Purples have savored the moment, and they’re clearly embracing the opportunity in front of them.

“We just want to go out with a bang,” BGHS senior guard Deuce Bailey said.

Bowling Green (28-6) and Adair County High School (30-5) will kick things off in this year’s Sweet 16, in the opening game set for Wednesday morning at Lexington’s Rupp Arena. The high school had a send-off for the Purples on Tuesday morning, before the team boarded buses for Lexington, and there will be plenty of fanfare surrounding the four-day spectacle that is the KHSAA Sweet 16.

One of the keys is figuring out how to stick around for all of those four days.

The Purples pulled it off in 2017, when Terry Taylor and Zion Harmon provided a rare 1-2 punch while winning the state championship. The Purples closed that memorable season with a 36-2 record, a 29-game winning streak, and four decisive victories in Lexington for the state title.

The championship game, against Boone County’s Cooper High School, was the only game that was reasonably close, and Bowling Green won that one, 67-56.

In 2021, the Purples got to Lexington and cruised past Hopkinsville’s University Heights Academy, 83-57, before bowing out with a 61-53 loss to Louisville’s Ballard High School in the Sweet 16 quarterfinals.

Deuce Bailey was an eighth grader that year, at Bowling Green Junior High, but he played in 10 varsity games that year, and picked up first-hand experience of the Sweet 16, from a player’s perspective.

Bailey became the BGHS football team’s starting quarterback four games into his freshman year, at the high school, and he’s been a mainstay for the Purples basketball team since then, too. But Bailey’s prowess on the football field was turning heads, and he guided Bowling Green to three consecutive berths in the KHSAA Class 5A state championship game, winning the last two.

In decisive fashion.

Shortly after graduating later this spring, Bailey will be leaving for Springfield, Missouri, where he’ll be playing college football for the Missouri State Bears. Missouri State will be a member of Conference USA for the next school year, so Purples fans may get the opportunity to see plenty of Deuce Bailey when the Bears square off with his hometown university, Western Kentucky.

BGHS coach D.G. Sherrill understands it’s been a pretty tough balancing act, for Bailey and the Purples.

“Deuce was the preseason 4th Region Player of the Year,” Sherrill said. “A lot of people forget that. Deuce’s plate is full, and he’s going to be a Division I quarterback … We had to balance some things, with that in mind … Deuce, he is a college basketball player, he’s just playing college football.”

Bailey and four of his senior BGHS teammates — Braylon Banks, Luke Idlett, Kadyn Carpenter and Jace Wardlow — have been hittin’ the courts and bangin’ the boards since they were in knee pants. If they weren’t teammates, they were familiar opponents. The Purples gained a valuable addition when Joe Hurt, a slender, 6-foot-5 transfer from Louisville’s Fairdale High School, enrolled at Bowling Green over the summer, and the group molded themselves into the backbone of a state tournament team.

“I wanted it, for them, these six seniors,” Sherrill said. “You know what a special experience it is, to finish your (high school) career at Rupp Arena.”

The Purples are ready to experience it themselves.

“I liked the guys, right away. I felt like I could blend in with them,” Hurt said.

The Purples have made that happen, and they’ll take a nine-game winning streak into the Sweet 16 appointment with Adair County on Wednesday. The winner of that game will face either Calloway County (31-3) or Ashland Blazer (23-7) in the quarterfinals on Friday morning.

So the six BGHS seniors know it’s prudent to focus on the task at hand.

“We’ve got to be ‘all in.’ That’s what it’s going to take,” Purples guard Kadyn Carpenter said.

Luke Idlett, who scored 21 points to lead Bowling Green past Clinton County, 66-59, in last week’s 4th Region championship game, would tend to concur.

“We always thought we had the talent,” Idlett said. “Now, we’ve got to be in the moment. We’ve got to compete. We’ve got to be mentally strong.”

Jace Wardlow, whose older brother, M.J. Wardlow, is playing in the NJCAA national championships this weekend, also understands. (M.J. Wardlow is a freshman guard for Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, where he’s averaging nine points per game.)

“We’ve pushed ourselves, in practice, every day,” Jace Wardlow said.

Braylon Banks, the smooth, 6-foot-1 senior guard who hit the game-winning shot against Warren Central in the 14th District championship game, said the Purples seniors have learned to anticipate one another’s tendencies on the court.

“We’ve been friends, for a long time, but we treat each other like family,” Banks said.

Maybe that’s the key, the critical factor that has carried Bowling Green back to Rupp Arena. Well, that and a lot of long road trips, film sessions, and time on the practice floor.

“There’s no substitute for experience,” BGHS coach D.G. Sherrill said after the Purples’ victory over Clinton County last week. “Luke (Idlett) hit a big 3, to kind of get us going (in the first quarter) … In the fourth quarter, I do think our experience mattered.”

Next stop, Rupp Arena.