By TYLER HENRY
Salina Post contributor
The 2020-2021 Sacred Heart Knights boys basketball team has gotten off to a textbook up and down start to their season, bookending a three-game losing streak with two three-game winning streaks.
The Knights, now 6-3, have looked good on the floor but have struggled to get into a rhythm thanks in large part to a consistent string of Covid-related cancellations.
“We’ve hit some rough patches against some of our better opponents but overall I’ve been satisfied with what I’ve seen,” Knights head coach Brian Gormley said. “The hardest thing has been finding a consistent flow of games, Our guys haven’t been able to get into that Tuesday to Friday flow.”
Despite not getting into the flow of things just yet, Sacred Heart has put themselves in a great position heading into the final month of the regular season, and should have a strong case for a playoff run come sub-state time.
“We’re consistently good and we play well together,” Gormley said. “We haven’t had a bad rebounding game and our guys share the ball really well. We might need to find more late game offense, but when you can narrow your improvements down to the last five minutes of a game that’s great for a coach.”
While the senior core of Jacob Gormley, Caleb Gilliland, Mason Richards and Kobe Douglas has more or less played up to expectations, the production of junior center Alex Disberger has come as a welcome surprise, helping the Knights to fill out a dangerous starting five.
“As a sophomore, he wasn’t really a part of our varsity rotation and wasn’t putting up big numbers,” Gormley said. “But you could tell this year as a junior that he was going to break out and he’s been even better than we thought”
The biggest area of improvement for Sacred Heart will, as previously mentioned, be late game scoring. While the Knights have played well all season, keeping all three of their losses to single digits, those games are ones that Coach Gormley feels his team had a chance in.
“We’re looking for the kind of attack that we need in ‘must have basket situations’ and looking for better offense in the fourth quarter,” he said. “In order to get to where we need to go we have to be consistently good in that final quarter.”
Sacred Heart will be tested down the stretch with upcoming matchups featuring 7-5 Southeast of Saline, 10-3 Minneapolis, and a pair of games against 6-3 Ellsworth.
Each of these games will be crucial to the Knights sub-state seeding in a bracket that will feature some of the best talent in the state.
“We have a strong sub-state including arguably the best team in class 2A in Hillsboro,” he said. “They’re going to come in ready to play and right now we’re sitting in that 3-4 seed range. We need to make sure that we do what we need to do to host that first round game.”
Sacred Heart will be back in action on Tuesday when they travel to Gypsum to face a Southeast of Saline team that has won six of their last seven games.