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East boys hang with McKinley to the end
By Joe Scalzo
canton
East High boys basketball coach Mark Cherol didn’t mind that his team was entering a gym full of skeptics Saturday night.
All he needed was a locker room full of believers.
“I told the kids, ‘Nobody considers Youngstown teams pretty solid,’ ” Cherol said. “But I said, ‘We can beat this team. Just go out there and give everything you have.’
“And they did.”
The Panthers went toe-to-toe with one of Ohio’s best basketball programs before faltering in the final minutes, losing 58-52 to Canton McKinley in a Division I sectional final at the Canton Civic Center.
“It hurts,” Cherol said. “We just didn’t do the right things at crunch time when we needed to.”
Senior Norman Johnson, one of five senior starters, scored a game-high 16 points to go with five rebounds for East (15-5), which finished with the best record of its three-year history. Senior Justin Brown, a 6-foot-6 center, added eight points, nine rebounds and five assists.
The game was close throughout, with the six-point margin of victory matching McKinley’s biggest lead of the game. East actually led by three, 43-40, with five minutes left, stymieing McKinley with a 2-3 zone after playing man-to-man for much of the season.
“Their kids were hungry, they executed and they did what they had to do,” said McKinley coach Greg Malone. “We kind of stood around and let them be the aggressor.”
But McKinley stepped up its intensity in the final minutes, with Da’Vontai Rorie scoring eight points in the final five minutes, while grabbing several key offensive rebounds.
When asked if his team may have overlooked East, Malone said, “If I knew what went on in the teenage mind, I wouldn’t be here in the midst of all this snow.”
Rorie and Isiah Elliot each finished with 10 points for McKinley (18-4) and Jamon McClain had 11.