HENDERSON – Skyelar Potter picked up right where he left off last season, putting Warren Central on his back and scoring 35 points while picking up 13 rebounds to lead the Dragons to an 87-64 blowout win over Henderson.
After scoring 16 points in the first half, Potter matched that performance in the third quarter with 16 more points to turn a 34-32 halftime deficit into 63-49 lead after three quarters.
Potter averaged 20.2 points and 11.8 rebounds last season for a 17-14 Warren Central team that was missing two starters with injuries for most of the season.
“He shot 58 percent from 2 and 44 on 3s on a bad team [last year]. Now he’s got help,” Warren Central head coach William Unseld said. “He might average 30 this year.”
Potter’s ability to light up the scoreboard lit a fire under the Dragons after falling behind 24-12 in the first quarter. Warren Central (1-0) held the Colonels to just six field goals in the second and third quarters combined.
“Skyelar Potter put them on his back. He took over in stretches and it got everybody else on his team so confident. Potter drove that engine,” Henderson County head coach Tyler Smithhart said. “I felt like Skyelar Potter was going to be a difference maker tonight, but man that dude’s on a whole other level.”
The Dragons struggled to stop the Colonels’ speed on defense in the first quarter, but corrected those bugs with some slight adjustments and held Henderson (0-1) to 24 combined points in the next two quarters.
“I told them yesterday that they were going to backdoor us. We worked on sprinting and taking it away,” Unseld said. “In the first half, we didn’t move. They’d go backdoor and we stood. They got easy shots. Once we corrected that, they struggled to score on us.”
The lack of depth and size for the Colonels was no match for the size of Warren Central once Potter and company got rolling.
“Once we stopped scoring the basketball, mentally we weren’t prepared to handle that kind of adversity,” Smithhart said. “We got into a little bit of foul trouble, and once we had to go to a four-guard set, we really couldn’t match up with them in any of our defenses.”
Henderson scored the last nine points of the contest, but could not even come close to threatening again as the Dragons built their lead to almost 30.
“We looked like a Second Region contender for about a quarter,” Smithhart said. “We showed a flash of what this team is capable of. Now we have to figure out how to put it together for 32 minutes.”
Accompanying Potter’s 35 points were 16 points from Jordan Cousin and 10 points from Micale Mee. The Dragons shot 14-19 from the free throw line as opposed to 18-28 by Henderson.
Cartel Gilbert led the Colonels with 16 points while Kale Gaither added 12 and Jadal Fletcher added 10. Fletcher tallied all of his points in the first half. Henderson committed 21 turnovers to Warren Central’s 16.
Warren Central will host Apollo on Friday evening for their next game while Henderson will face off with another 4th Region opponent in Barren County in the First State Bank Tipoff Classic at Muhlenberg County on Saturday.
