Trotwood-Madison coach Rocky Rockhold and his two best players – Amari Davis and Carl Blanton – spoke with eagerness for Saturday’s Division II championship game against Columbus South. They desperately want to win the school’s first title, but to them it’s not that simplistic.
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First, they choose not to think of themselves as the favorite.
“We talk about being the underdog, and we talk about everybody’s going to give us their best, therefore we’re the underdog,” Rockhold said.
The top-ranked Rams (27-2) will not be the underdog at 2 p.m. today at the Schottenstein Center against second-ranked South (28-1). The Rams defeated South 79-60 in the regional semifinals last year, and they have the experience of being here for the third straight year. So South coach Ramon Spears knows what to expect — a Trotwood offense that tries to score as quickly as possible and a defense that presses, traps and can force a team into a season-high of turnovers.
“They just wear you down — they’re physical,” Spears said. “We’ll change up our defense, and we’re not going to turn it into an open-gym game. There’s going to have to be a lot of coaching in this game. We’ll come to play.”
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No doubt the Rams will “come to play” as well, knowing that rattling South’s guards might not be as easy as thery’re used to. Of all the things they are doing for mental motivation, redemption for the losses the past two years against Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary is at the root.
“We’ve got a lot of bad memories about Coach [Dru] Joyce and St. V,” Rockhold said. “We talk about the pressure’s on us this year. A lot of people felt like we had the upper hand, so we just talk about flipping that and applying the pressure to them.”
The Rams do that with their destructive and relentless full-court press and traps in the backcourt that force opposing guards into instant and difficult decisions.
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Davis is the Rams’ senior leader, a 30-point-a-game scorer and the Division II player of the year. He will be playing Division I college basketball next year at Wisconsin Green Bay in the Horizon League against Wright State. He knows what is expected of his team, and that’s why he doesn’t want the memory of a third loss in the final four.
“This is my last year so I’m going to leave it all on the court,” he said. “It’s going to be an emotional game for me because it will be my last game in a Trotwood uniform.”
Another reason it’s not as simple as just feeling pressure this weekend is because the Rams have been dealing with and accepting that fact for the past 12 months.
“We built for this,” Davis said. “The first day of summer workouts we knew that we were preparing for March.”
Which is why Davis said the team is not playing with a special edge at state: “When we play anybody we’re going to get their best just because of who we are. We just take every game like it’s our last.”
Rockhold followed up: “We have played all year with a sense of urgency, not just tonight or not just in the tournament.”
That sense of urgency continued on Friday and will continue Saturday morning at practice. Yes, the Rams will practice on Saturday before the game. It won’t be a simple walk-through or shoot-around. When the question was asked Thursday night if practice would be hard Friday, Blanton made an audible smirk as if to say, “Are you kidding?”
After everyone laughed, Blanton said, “Yes. But I’m fine with that. It ain’t never easy.”
Neither is winning a state championship.
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