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BOURBON – According to Triton head coach Jason Groves, the five seniors on his roster have an incredibly unique opportunity in front of them as they prepare for the 1A state championship game against Barr-Reeve on Saturday.
They know that this will be their final game.
And while there might be a bittersweet feeling involved in that reality, what better way for Gage Riffle, Julian Swanson, Landon Patrick, Jayden Overmyer and Isaac Quintana to go out than by playing for a state championship?
“It’s what you dream about as a kid. Knowing you get to end your career playing for something like that,” Groves said. “It’s a chance to go out there, have fun, and leave it all out on the line one last time. It’s an incredible opportunity and I’m happy for them.”
As for the players themselves, the thought of their long journey reaching its conclusion is beginning to set in.
“It’s humbling, but to know that, it allows me to mentally prepare for that fact. The fact that it’s going to be the biggest game of my career helps too, because I can just settle in and focus on that,” Riffle said. “I’m just so grateful that I’ll be able to do it with these guys.”
“I think that it’s going to give me a type of closure with the game of basketball that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I just think knowing that it’s going to be my last game, I’ll be able to soak it all in a bit more and live in the moment,” said Patrick.”
“It feels good knowing that we’re going to go out having met our goal,” Overmyer added. “We’ve wanted to make it here for as long as we can remember.”
These five seniors have been through a lot in their time playing basketball together, more specifically, a lot of winning.The majority of this group has been playing together from the fifth grade onward, having known each other for even longer than that. That has provided the team with an added element of camaraderie that isn’t as common as it used to be.
“We’ve been friends since birth. Most teams don’t have that togetherness that we’ve had,” Quintana said. “Our bonds are unbreakable.”
The group’s success in the Triton program was immediate, going undefeated in their fifth, sixth and seventh grade years. According to Quintana, that was around the time he knew he was a part of something special.
“After our third year in a row going undefeated, we were like woah,” he said. “People definitely started to notice what we were doing.”
Patrick, who moved into the Triton system right before his freshman year, may not have been a part of those early runs, but it didn’t take him long to get assimilated to the blue and gold.
“I had played against them in middle school and knew they were pretty good, and then when I moved in, and Brady Wood moved in, we kind of felt like the pieces were coming together,” he said. “I remember telling my dad after the semi-state that everything happens for a reason. We fell in place here at Triton.”
That success certainly carried over to the high school level, and in each of the last two years, the Trojan leaders have been rewarded with hardware. Now, after winning a pair of sectional and regional titles, as well as a semi-state championship, which every player stated was their favorite memory in a Triton uniform, their careers will culminate at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
“Getting to do this with them means a lot. We’ve been waiting on this opportunity for a long time,” Swanson said. “We know people in the community that have been to state and won state, and we look up to them. It’s been our goal for a long time.”
The fact that the Trojans came so close last year, dropping the semi-state opener to eventual runners up Clinton Prairie, makes it all the more sweet that this time around, the group was able to take care of unfinished business.
“We understood our potential, only lost two guys that played a crucial role for us. I knew we were going to make it far this year, I just couldn’t grasp quite how far until we won on Saturday,” Riffle said. “I think we just mesh better this year. We all love the game. We all put in time and effort and it shows. It means the world to me to do it with these guys.”
On Saturday morning, these five Triton seniors will put on that uniform for the final time and attempt to bring a second state championship home to Bourbon. Whether they do so or not, Groves isn’t sure matters in the long run..
“This community loves basketball, but more importantly, they love these kids,” he said. “They’ve already won. I don’t know if they know that, but they have.”
