SHERIFF’S CLASSIC: 10th Anniversary kicks off with thrilling bang, as Hornell girls, Wellsville boys gather victories behind wire-to-wire finishes to split Barkley Showcase precursor
WELLSVILLE — Let’s take a trip back in time, shall we? 10 years ago, the inaugural installment of what is renowned as the local basketball scene’s biggest weekend of the winter. The Dan Barkley Showcase was born.
Since the very genesis of its journey, the Allegany County-Steuben County battles have provided countless amazing memories over the years. So many different participants, and from them, many new rivalries were formed.
Just some of those memories that have been stashed away in the Showcase’s memory bank? — An absolutely sinister, record-breaking 54-point night from Adam Enders to pace Belfast past Avoca at Alfred State in the tournament’s first-ever overtime game back in 2019. One year later in the Showcase's return to the Orvis Activities Center, Max Jusianiec raked in a 1,000-point career with Wellsville with his father, Jerry Jusianiec, serving as the team’s interim head coach in their instant classic win over Hornell.
Back a couple of years ago, the Showcase witnessed the first double-overtime game between Bolivar-Richburg and then-host Bath-Haverling, with a Jake Hagadone game-winning shot heard all around Bath aiding the Rams in knocking off the Wolverines in the final game of the Showcase to earn Steuben County a complete 7-0 sweep over Allegany County in 2023 — also a Showcase first.
We can go even further back than this, right? Sure we can!
How about the very first year back in 2015? The first of many clashes in the famed Showcase between two archrivals. One of Section V’s most notorious rivalries to date, gracing the center stage in the Lion’s Den. The two teams simply need no introduction — Hornell and Wellsville.
The atmosphere inside the gym that January night, one-of-a-kind. You had to be there to believe it. The grandstands on all sides of the playing surface, packed to the brim with spectators far and wide from the surrounding Wellsville and Hornell areas, with more and more circulating their way in through the double doors. When it was all said and done, both baselines on each end of the floor were furrowed with fans anxiously awaiting the marquee battle of the night.
A phenomenal introduction, to say the least, to the Showcase that certainly helped lay the foundation down for what is today.
After some adjusting and some shaping of the annual winter classic through the years, both Hornell and Wellsville boys and girls teams now occupy the precursing event to the Showcase’s main docket the following day — the Sheriff’s Classic, from beneath a spotlight that has never burned much brighter than ever before on a night that now belongs to them, and them alone.
Fast-forward a decade back into the future, to the present day. The Barkley Showcase has made its grand return to where it all started. And what better way to celebrate the 10-year jubilee in Wellsville than with the very same Red Raiders-Lions clash that has registered numerous instant classics over the course of time.
Friday night once again proved no different.
Leading off with game one were the 10-1 Lady Red Raiders and the 10-2 Lady Lions — two teams fighting feverishly for prime positioning towards the top of the Class B1 leaderboard for Sectionals. At this stage of the game, with the big dance beginning to lurk around the corner, momentum is desired. In their first rendezvous of two in this year’s crusade on the hardwood, there was most certainly enough of it to go around from every square inch of the floor.
After a back-and-forth conclusion to the first half that saw the playing surface become level going into the locker room, it became a dead heat straight to the finish line between Hornell and Wellsville, with the contest coming down to the very last minute of play.
With the Lady Red Raiders continuing to hold onto their one-possession advantage on top of the Lady Lions, Wellsville did everything in their power to dig in one last time to try and turn the tide in the game’s waning moments. But after some mighty shots at the free throw line, along with a crucial forced turnover against the Lady Lions with five seconds left, they wound up surviving the night to give Steuben County their first win of the Showcase in thrilling fashion by a 60-55 final count.
“I thought we fought hard. It was a night where shots didn’t go in. We just really had to be physical and play defense,” said Lady Red Raiders coach Jimmy Dagon. “It was a scrappy win, I thought. Wellsville is always really good. They’re super tough to play here all the time. The crowd was awesome, and the girls stayed tough all throughout it. This was one of our tougher wins on the season, and we’re probably going to end up seeing Wellsville again in Sectionals at some point, so we have to be ready for it. Tonight was a good way to do that.”
Right from the start, the Lady Red Raiders (11-1) were in control, as they zipped out of the gate with two quick baskets to force Wellsville into the passenger’s seat. But after a brief timeout on the sideline, the Lady Lions regrouped and refocused on the task at hand, trading back-and-forth barbs with Hornell before claiming control of the steering wheel behind a long Natalie Adams bomb from downtown approaching midway in the frame.
It served as the first of three straight shots from the outer perimeter for the Lady Lions (10-3), with Jaden Dunbar sandwiching two of her own in between Adams’ second long shot from just outside the right wing to usher an early, but massive 9-1 run of Hornell. The message from head coach Michelle Alvord to her Lady Lions? — Simple: Relax.
“I told the girls to just take a deep breath and just to remember what we had focused on in practice coming into this game,” the Lady Lions coach said. “We needed to execute, breathe and calm down, and if we did that, we would be fine. But we also have to remember what we were doing, what our purpose and our game-plan was. This team has a really good, strong team chemistry and that’s been one of my favorite parts about coaching this team these last few years.”
With a 13-7 edge now in the home team’s possession, it was now on the Red Raiders to guide their way back into the fray following a timeout after Wellsville’s latest run. Hornell proceeded to do just that, ending the frame with six of the final seven points — three of them off a clutch Jordyn Dyring triple to pull within a single point of the Lady Lions.
The momentum journeyed on for Hornell at the start of the second quarter, as they regained the upper-hand behind a Payton Bentley triple that saw the advantage ascend to as high as five in the midst of another constant trade of scores in the early-going. Later on, the lead was relinquished back to Wellsville again behind the leadership of Makenna Dunbar, who assembled a strong inside presence with back-to-back strikes to propel the team back on top, 23-22 with 2:18 left in the half.
Then, it was Selena Maldonado’s turn to tilt the balance, as she accounted for the last five points of the half for the Lady Red Raiders — her first connection on a hard run up to the rim, following it up on the very next possession with a game-tying triple to place a 27-27 deadlock on the scoreboard going into the break.
In the third quarter, the Lady Red Raiders ran the full sprint behind a half-opening trey from the hand of Mia Nasca, gaining more traction alongside inside assistance from Maldonado, as well as back-to-back baskets from Jordyn Dyring and a nice inside look from Raegan Evingham to enforce a 9-0 jaunt on the Lady Lions to break the ice.
The lead held firm for the visitors in red and blue, as they carried a 40-36 advantage into the fourth quarter and added more onto the pile with six of the first eight points going their way. Just as Hornell began to find a smooth groove to travel on, the Lady Lions rebounded and disrupted the path with an 8-0 run in return, led by Caelyn Stevens and Jaden Dunbar, as the two shooters went back-to-back from three-point range in the midst of all the chaos to tie the game at 46 approaching midway.
From that juncture forward, it was anyone’s game.
With Wellsville remaining hot on their trail, the Lady Red Raiders witnessed a clutch outing come to fruition by A’Jonay Hawkins, who scored five massive fourth quarter points to essentially cement Hornell’s advantage, including a gargantuan three-point play with less than a minute remaining before recording another basket down low to branch the lead back out entering the waning stages.
The Lady Lions managed to close the gap to a single point behind Dunbar and a clutch three-point play at the line of her own, but it would be as close as they would get to Hornell, as the Lady Red Raiders survived the night with more assistance from the charity stripe from Dyring, who finished a perfect 6-for-6 in the frame, along with the forcing of a turnover by Maldonado with five seconds left to freeze the Wellsville offense completely.
Maldonado was awarded MVP honors for the Lady Red Raiders, paving the way forward for the offense behind her team-leading 19 points.
With the win over their archrival now in the wagon, the message going forward for Dagon is to just keep improving all the way to the end.
“We just need to keep improving every day. I think that we’re better today than we were yesterday,” he said. “We’re definitely better than we were in our first game of the season. Just focusing on the minor details and things like that, taking key steps, staying healthy, staying fresh. We get next week off after we played our third in four days. We’ll be rested up to focus up and take things one game at a time again.”
Following behind Maldonado was Dyring, who finished with 17 points for Hornell. Payton Bentley chipped in with eight points.
For the Lady Lions, the offense was powered by Dunbar, who concluded the evening with a game-high 25 points, pairing them with 11 rebounds to complete a double-double. Jaden Dunbar and Natalie Adams each followed with 11 points each.
On special teams, Emily Stuck grabbed eight boards. Caelyn Stevens recorded more seven boards. Alexa Hennessy added five more rebounds and handed out five assists.
“The girls have played together a lot more and they established so much more experience from that. Even the beginning of the season to the Barkley last year to now has obviously shown a lot of improvement,” Alvord said of the team. “I thought tonight, other than the foul trouble, Emily Stuck really gave us a spark, Alexa Hennessy gave us strong minutes, and then you add in the consistency of Makenna Dunbar and Natalie Adams, and Caelyn Stevens. It’s just a matter of experience. The idea has been to just take care of business and to be able to keep that focus in view. We definitely have some opponents that we’ve lost to early in the season coming up later, so I’m really looking forward to the growth and development, and the continued effort and consistency that these girls are putting in.”
With everyone still clinging to the edge of their seat in the opening act of the night, the nightcap spotlight now shone on the boys to continue setting the bar for the weekend. When you take a quick skim through the history books at the Hornell and Wellsville boys basketball rivalry, it should come as no surprise that the expectation in store for battle for almost every occasion, was another potential instant classic in the making.
That was exactly what the fortune teller saw through the crystal ball.
In front of another near-standing room only crowd in the Lion’s Den, Hornell and Wellsville assembled yet another timeless masterpiece to affix into the collection. Plenty of fireworks were put on display, plenty of momentum shifts were balanced and plenty of adrenaline rushes were coursing through the veins of the 10 shooters on the basketball surface from start to finish.
With a halftime lead for the Lions being wiped out completely by a giant third quarter run by the Red Raiders, the fourth quarter once again proved its mass significance. With Hornell holstering all the momentum entering the stanza, the Lions remained poised and vigilant to shake it off with their opposition facing a dangerous amount of foul trouble.
They lived up to the promise, hanging right behind their archrival through thick and thin of the second half to piece together one epic finish.
It began as a stealthily-lit flame at the start of the quarter, but as time passed, it exponentially grew in size to the point where Hornell could not supply an extinguisher to the hottest hand on the floor.
That belonged to Aiden Cowburn. And because of his efforts, the five-alarm fire kept on burning with no end in sight.
After being held scoreless across the board in the first half, the Wellsville senior turned it up in the last eight minutes of play, as he led the Lions and their herculean 23-point fourth quarter with a 14-point amalgamation of his own, running the table against the Red Raiders to finish off yet another remarkable instant classic for the Showcase’s history books with Allegany County’s first win of the weekend in a 63-57 final tally.
“There’s perseverance here, because it’s a loud environment. It’s a hyped-up game. To be able to come out here and execute is something. It prepares you for games down the road, and it’s what everyone wants to be a part of,” Lions coach Tom Muska said. “You want to be a part of games like this, so it’s good to walk away with a win. There’s no game I would rather be a part of, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than coaching Wellsville. I want to be here for as long as I can coach, and I want to be a part of these games for as long as they’re here. It’s a rivalry I hope continues on for another 140 years. We have high expectations. Every year, it’s to put one of these banners back up on the wall. We have a lot of these in here and it’s all we talk about. We have our eyes on it this year, and I think we can get there. But we have to keep working every day.”
The epic finish allocated by Cowburn in the game’s waning moments could not be done without the rapid-fire arm of Ty Vogel almost immediately off the tip at mid-court to start the heat of battle, as his fellow Lions (7-5) senior was untouchable from all over the floor, putting strong emphasis on his first half of play with 18 of his game-high 20 points coming in the first 16 minutes — 13 of them in the first quarter alone off three triples and an array of baskets inside to help kickstart what was an 11-2 run early on.
Red Raiders coach Kirk Scholes praised Vogel’s red hot hand for the Lions.
“First half, I thought Tyler Vogel was outstanding for them. He carried them early on. I think he had 15 or 18 points at the half. He really put us in a hole,” he said of the Wellsville senior. “I thought we were really gritty, and we found a way to fight back after that. We talk all the time about defense. We’re always defense first. We start practice every day with it. We know that your offense won’t always be there, the defense has to carry you night in and night out, especially when you’re not shooting well. That’s always our identity to start with.”
The lead ultimately worked its way towards 13 at the absolute most for the Lions, all behind Vogel’s third triple of the quarter, but the Red Raiders (7-4) were able to find their rhythm with a strong conclusion to the frame, as Austyn Gollnitz and Wyatt Evingham each put away a basket in rapid succession to close the gap down to a 19-8 deficit.
The Lions remained in cruise control through much of the second quarter, despite Hornell continuing to chip away at their deficit in any way, shape or form they could, maintaining their lead through a flurry of back-and-forth exchanges. As a result, the hosts in white and orange went back to the locker room with a 31-22 advantage in hand.
In the third quarter, a much different story was told.
The Lions were denied the basket through the first five minutes of play in the second half, which allowed Hornell to break down the door and explode for an 8-0 run behind PJ Picco and his fiery hand, delivering back-to-back triples from long range to grant the team their first lead of the game, sending the bench into a craze in the same swing.
Just as Wellsville began to regain their scoring edge behind some help at the charity stripe, followed by a big offensive board cashed in by Trent Green down low to tie the game, the Red Raiders received the advantage right back again behind the efforts of Picco, who proceeded to bucket his third trey of the frame to fully ignite the offense with 90 seconds remaining.
“PJ got us going and led us for a good portion of it. We did a better job of things in the third quarter, letting them move the ball and sharing. We have to do it more and we have to do it much better,” Scholes said. “We’ll get there. It’s good for us to be tested in an environment like this. We need games like this, where the crowds are against us, a student section is after us. It builds your team and makes you better. I like playing at Alfred State, Alfred U, but these Hornell-Wellsville games are much more special getting after it both ways, home and away.”
After garnering a 44-40 lead to carry into the fourth quarter, the Red Raiders now had to navigate treacherous waters due to foul trouble in order to keep their lead intact. But along the way, a hero arose to the occasion for the Lions — Aiden Cowburn, beginning his shape-shifting fourth quarter with two of his three long bombs from downtown in furious succession to trim what was a nine-point deficit down to three.
With both Gollnitz and Marco Picco each being escorted to the bench following their fifth foul violations, that allowed the Lions to connect from the free throw line with Cowburn knocking down two big shots to flip the lead in their favor before two shots from Wyatt Evingham on the opposite end of the floor reversed the 57-56 lead back in Hornell’s favor in the final stages of battle.
Cowburn then took matters into his hands one more time to finish off his MVP performance for the hosts, knocking down his final three-pointer that ultimately served as the game’s dagger with 20 seconds remaining to claim a 59-57 advantage, as the team proceeded to hold it together until the final buzzer behind four more clutch shots at the charity stripe.
“In the fourth quarter, Cowburn took over,” said Scholes. “He knocked down three threes and had like 13 points in the quarter. Wellsville really made some plays down the stretch and we missed shots of our own down the stretch. It’s a Hornell-Wellsville game all the way through. It was gritty, but Wellsville got the better end at the end. They had the game’s last run, and they got the better of us. We live and learn. We have to be much better down the stretch of a basketball game if we want to do anything in Sectionals.”
Behind Vogel’s 20 and Cowburn’s 16 points for the Lions, two more scorers eclipsed the double-digit mark for the attack, with Trent Green finishing with 14 points of his own. JJ Howard pitched in 11 points, while Karson Grover connected on a pair of points from the line to help round off the attacking efforts.
For Hornell, PJ Picco led all shooters with a game-high 25 points. Wyatt Evingham concluded with a 16-point performance, while Austyn Gollnitz had eight points.
Listed below are the next games for all four teams, as they now enter the extended weekend with the Martin Luther King Day holiday forthcoming on Monday.
Wellsville Boys: vs. Bolivar-Richburg, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday (Senior Night)
Hornell Boys: vs. Canisteo-Greenwood, 7 p.m. Tuesday
Hornell Girls: at York, next Tuesday (1.28) 7 p.m.
Wellsville Girls: at Olean, Tuesday 7:30 p.m.
The action resumes back inside the Lion’s Den this afternoon for the main Dan Barkley Showcase docket. Listed below is the complete slate of boys basketball contests that will take place:
Canisteo-Greenwood vs. Cuba-Rushford, 1 p.m.
Dundee/Bradford vs. Andover/Whitesville, 3 p.m.
Arkport-Canaseraga vs. Genesee Valley/Belfast, 5 p.m.
Girls
Hornell 13 14 13 20 – 60
Wellsville 14 13 9 19 – 55
HORNELL: Mia Nasca 2 0-0 5, Jordyn Dyring 5 6-6 17, Payton Bentley 3 1-2 8, Selena Maldonado 7 4-6 19, Raegan Evingham 3 0-0 6, A'Jonay Hawkins 2 1-3 5. Totals: 22 12-17 60.
WELLSVILLE: Caelyn Stevens 2 1-2 6, Natalie Adams 3 3-4 11, Emily Stuck 1 0-0 2, Makenna Dunbar 8 9-14 25, Jaden Dunbar 4 0-0 11. Totals: 18 13-20 55.
3-point goals: Hornell 4 (Nasca, Dyring, Bentley, Maldonado), Wellsville 6 (J. Dunbar 3, Adams 2, Stevens).
Total Fouls: Hornell 19, Wellsville 16. Fouled out: Evingham (HHS), Stuck (WLSV).
Boys
Hornell 8 14 22 13 – 57
Wellsville 19 12 9 23 – 63
HORNELL: Wyatt Evingham 6 3-4 16, Demayne Dixon 1 0-0 2, Marco Picco 1 0-0 3, Austyn Gollnitz 4 0-0 8, PJ Picco 8 6-7 25, Benjamin Woolever 1 0-0 3. Totals: 21 9-11 57.
WELLSVILLE: Aiden Cowburn 3 7-8 16, Karson Grover 0 2-2 2, JJ Howard 5 1-6 11, Ty Vogel 7 2-2 20, Trent Green 6 2-5 14. Totals: 21 14-23 63.
3-point goals: Hornell 6 (P. Picco 3, Evingham, M. Picco, Woolever), Wellsville 7 (Vogel 4, Cowburn 3).
Total Fouls: Hornell 23, Wellsville 18. Fouled out: Dixon (HHS), M. Picco (HHS), Gollnitz (HHS).
