Prep basketball: 9 other schools will be targeting top-seeded Gremlins in Kaysinger boys and girls tourneys

With the annual Kaysinger Conference tournament ready to invade the idyllic Fred E. Davis Multipurpose Center, a theme has emerged across the girls and boys sides of the brackets: the 20-team event is a showcase of trends.

On one side, you have a girls tournament that’s featured a different champion the past four years.

With Cole Camp, Northwest, Sacred Heart and Smithton sharing the hardware during that spell, upsets have been the norm in a grouping defined by parity.

Even with Sacred Heart (13-4, 7-0) entering the showcase undefeated in conference play, that should be no different this season.

To illustrate, Windsor and its 7-1 league mark only garnered the third seed while Smithton (10-8, 4-3), which shared the regular-season conference title with the Greyhounds (12-4) last year, is seeded fifth and is in line for a first-round battle against fourth-seeded Stover (10-7, 4-2), whose lone league losses came to Windsor and Cole Camp.

Speaking of the Bluebirds (10-9), who garnered the second seed with a 7-1 mark: They recently had to stage a fourth-quarter comeback just to beat sixth-seeded Green Ridge (7-11, 3-4), which narrowly defeated seventh-seeded Lincoln in a nonconference game in December.

The hierarchy, however, is more cut and dried on the boys side, which has featured just two tournament champions in the past five years.

In a nutshell, the division ranks as follows: Sacred Heart at the top, Tipton and Cole Camp in the middle tier, and seven teams looking to pull off a major upset.

Class 2’s third-ranked Gremlins (17-1, 7-0) have outscored conference opponents by an average of 78.5-53.4. But that unblemished mark has had its obstacles, including an overtime scare from second-seeded Tipton (14-4, 7-1) and an 84-77 win over third-seeded Cole Camp (12-7, 6-2). But like it typically does, Sacred Heart found ways to win.

Led by the Big Four and a strong cast of role players who would start on any other team, the Gremlins are vying for their fourth consecutive tournament title, a feat which has occurred just once in the tournament’s 35-year storied history. Cole Camp won five straight from 1996-2000.

But Sacred Heart coach Steve Goodwin, who notched his 300th career victory this week, is not one to rest on past successes.

“I’m just worried about this year,” said Goodwin, who’s team is also on the cusp of winning its fourth consecutive conference regular-season title. “We’ve got some really good teams in the tournament and they’re playing really well. Honestly, if anybody gets hot, there’s three or four teams that can win it.”

The Gremlins’ main competition is Tipton, which led Sacred Heart by as many as 11 points in their December meeting. The Cardinals, however, aren’t looking past a potential semifinal matchup with Cole Camp, whom they’ve defeated twice this season.

“We hope to get that chance to play Sacred Heart on (Feb. 11), but we don’t want to look past Cole Camp,” said Tipton coach Billy Jeffries, whose team went 0-3 against the Gremlins last year, including a 74-56 loss in the Class 2, District 8 final. “We’ve been lucky enough to get past them twice, but it’s awful hard to beat a good club three times.”

If Tipton survives Cole Camp and Sacred Heart advances from their side of the draw, which features fourth-seeded Green Ridge, fifth-seeded Smithton, eighth-seeded Stover and ninth-seeded Northwest, the two teams would meet in the finals for the second consecutive year. Sacred Heart defeated the Cardinals 63-59 last year.

“If you look at it, we had an unbelievably close game against Tipton last year,” Goodwin said. “It really could have gone either way and we’ve been fortunate to pull out a couple of victories the last few years, including over Lincoln in ’09.”

Goodwin concedes the Gremlins have holes, and most could be found on the defensive end of the floor. That chink in the armor was exposed in the Gremlins’ 93-82 loss to Class 3 Higginsville, which handed Sacred Heart its first loss of the season in last week’s Slater Wildcat Championship.

Asked about whether the Gremlins, who allowed 77 points to Cole Camp and 67 to Tipton as part of a campaign where they’re giving up more than 56 points per contest, can afford to yield 93 points in the Kaysinger tournament, Goodwin quipped: “Hopefully if we do, it’s not in just one game.”

On the offensive end of the floor, it’s smooth sailing for a club averaging a monstrous 76.3 points per game despite resting its starters in more than half the games (nine contests have been won by more than 20 points). The prolific offensive numbers include 52 percent shooting from the Gremlins, who have four players averaging in double figures.

The team has clearly benefited from an area-best 9.6 assists per game from Lakin Kehde, who, along with averaging six points and club-best 3.8 steals per game, has a 3.8 assists-to-turnover ratio, which for reference is in Chris Paul territory. With a transcendent point guard as the floor general, Stefan Cox is averaging 18 points per game, followed by Jared Dey’s 17.1, Caleb Morrison’s 16.9 and Jerrion Jackson’s 10.9.

And the players have scored at an efficiently awe-inspiring clip. Cox is shooting 54 percent from the floor and 42 percent from beyond the arc on his way to three treys a contest, Morrison is shooting a team-best 63 percent shooting to go along with 7.6 boards and a team-high 1.5 blocks per game, Dey is shooting 57 percent from the floor to go along with a block and a club-best 11.7 boards per game, and Jackson is shooting 53 percent from the floor and averaging three steals per game.

And for Goodwin, what better venue to showcase the efficiency than the Sedalia-based arena.

“Everybody on our team is excited to play at the college. It’s just a wonderful basketball environment featuring great teams,” he said.

Jeffries echoes that sentiment.

“Everybody in the conference travels well and this is just one of those tournaments you can’t help but get up for and excited about,” he said.