The Patriot escape

BERNE — On Jan. 14, the Patriots decimated the Starfires by 47 points to pick up Jerry Bomholt’s 600th career win.

The Patriots traveled to the Stardome again, but the game couldn’t have looked any different.

Ten days after picking up a 47-point victory in the Allen County Athletic Conference tournament opener, the Jay County High School boys basketball team escaped with a 49-45 victory over the host South Adams Starfires on Friday.

The win comes on the tail of a narrow victory over a sub-.500 Hagerstown team on Tuesday and what Bomholt evaluated as a poor week of practice.

“We didn’t practice well this week … and it showed,” Bomholt said. “There was energy missing. You see it all the time at the college level and with other high school teams. For whatever reason, we couldn’t find the energy. It seemed like every time we got ready to get out of the gate, we’d stumble a little bit and do some God awful things. We had a stretch where we were trying to pull away and made three straight passes right to them and they converted. It wasn’t one of our better performances."

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Jay County basketball at South Adams (1/24/2025)

The Patriots (8-5, 2-1 ACAC) owned the paint the last time they played South Adams (2-7, 0-3 ACAC), with 22 points from Cole Forthofer, 14 scored by Gradin Swoveland and 11 from Tucker Griffin. In the rematch, the Starfires did a better job of protecting the paint both from drivers and post ups. As a result, they cut that same trio’s scoring to 23 points.

“We talked about that this week in practice and we really tried to force them up and force them out,” said SAHS coach Kyle Roe. “So I said, ‘Force them outside the lane and don’t let them catch it on the block because that’s where they’re going to score obviously.’

“I think our posts, Jackson (Roe) and Nolan (Colpaert) did a great job of forcing them up and out and not letting them get comfortable in the post. I think that was a big difference there.”

In the absence of a dominant post presence, Jay County got a lift from point guard Jayden Comer.

The sophomore finished with a team-high 18 points on 6-of-12 shooting and 4-of-10 behind the 3-point line. Eight of his points came in the third quarter as he helped JCHS build a 42-30 advantage.

Tytus Lehman gave the Patriots problems throughout, scoring a game-high 26 points largely off of drives from the wings and corners.

“He can do two or three things offensively,” Bomholt said. “He can shoot it, he can maneuver and drive it and he can make free throws. At the high school level, when you can do those two or three things, you can be effective.”

Lehman and Gavin Herring wouldn’t let the Starfires go down easy as they combined for 15 fourth-quarter points. Lehman cut the JCHS lead to single digits with 6:30 remaining after converting a three-point play.

Herring pulled South Adams within one at 1:54 after making a pair of bonus free throws that capped off a 15-4 run.

With 1:07 left, Bomholt called a timeout to review the team’s end-of-game plan. Coming out, the Patriots passed the ball around while trying to avoid being fouled to run off time. The clock winded down to 32 seconds before SAHS got the foul, which was only the second one for the team. Comer was then pushed by Derek McKean, but the Starfire junior was only whistled for a common foul. Then with 27.7 seconds, Comer got fouled again to go to the free-throw line for the bonus shots, sinking both to extend the lead to three.

“Just look at the rim and shoot the ball, there’s nothing else to it,” said Comer, who had missed a pair four minutes prior. “Don’t think about anything else but putting the ball in the rim.”

Jay County finished the game with a pair of stops before Aiden Phillips made a final trip to the charity stripe with 0.9 seconds on the clock. The junior knocked down the first shot to make it a two-possession game.

With the win, Jay County’s ACAC hopes stay alive. It is currently a half game behind Woodlan for the top spot. Should JCHS win out, the worst they could do is tie the Warriors for a share of the conference title.

Next on the schedule is Bluffton on Jan. 31, but to get the job done, Bomholt is looking for improvements in practice.

“We better practice better,” Bomholt said. “If we don’t practice better it won’t change. … This was tough, it was tough fighting through this, but they did it, so we’ll give them credit for that. We won’t give them credit for a good practice week, but we’ll try to give them credit that this coming week, we’ll be a little better in practice.”