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Grandy-ose achievement in Struthers
200th Win
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Struthers girls basketball coach John Grandy logged his 200th win against Youngstown East.
Wildcats’ victory over East nets veteran coach 200th win
By ERIC FORTUNE
YOUNGSTOWN
Exactly three years ago Struthers’ McKenna Shives reached 1,000 points for her career.
It was now John Grandy’s turn to hit a milestone in his 14th year as the coach of the Struthers Wildcats.
He reached victory No. 200 on the first day of February just like Shives did back in 2014 as the Wildcats got past an opportunistic East Panther squad 64-43.
“I’m blessed,” Grandy said. “I’m blessed to be the coach here at Struthers. I’ve been blessed with talent. I thank God every day that I get the chance to do what I do with good people. I have great assistant coaches. There are a lot of people that go with those 200 wins.
“When it says 200 wins, it’s my name, but there are a lot of other names they could put on that. It just kind of means I’m old. I’ve been around here for a long time. When I started out, I was on the 50-year program — two wins a year. It’s been a real pleasure to be here.”
When Shives was trying to hit that goal three years ago, Grandy was concerned that sometimes a milestone like that becomes bigger than the actual game.
This time around, he didn’t bring up the fact that a win Wednesday night would be No. 200 as he didn’t want put extra pressure on his team.
“I think our girls still didn’t know anything about this,” Grandy said. “I didn’t want to put pressure [on them]. It’s about them. It’s not about me. I appreciate everyone covering this kind of thing, but I can’t tell you how humbling it is. It’s not me. It’s so many other factors.”
After a back-and-forth affair in the opening quarter in which the Wildcats (14-4) held just a 19-15 lead, it would be Grandy’s great niece Emily that got Struthers going scoring nine of her game high 21 points in the second quarter.
“We’ve been basically doing the same thing all year,” Grandy said. “We’re kind of a man-to-man team, half court. We didn’t press real well today. I thought we could have done a better job on the boards. I thought our defense was a little sluggish.
“Offensively, we had some good shots. I thought Emily Grandy came through a little bit today. Maybe, because it’s her uncle. I don’t know. She did a nice job of making some big plays and put backs.” Her play pushed the game out to 39-23 at the half. She started the second quarter off with three straight buckets to push the lead out to 10 in the early stages of the second quarter.
“They came out and started to pressure us a little bit,” East coach Levon Lamb said. “We made some costly turnovers and couldn’t execute as well as I thought we could. I think that is what hurt us the most outside of the turnovers. They were able to come out and execute on their end. Once that happened, it was tough for us to climb out of that hole.”
Emily Grandy was big on the boards finishing with 10 rebounds and adding three 3s. Struthers pushed its advantage out to as much as 21 at one point in the third quarter.
East (4-13) made things interesting though starting the fourth quarter off on a 6-0 run to make it 51-39, but they couldn’t get it any closer.
Rayonna Booth led the Panthers with 19 points.