Chesterton employs four corners offense to shorten the game and slow a surging Merrillville team to win semifinal 66-53 to advance to today's sectional title game vs. Valparaiso at 6 p.m.

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The four corners offense works best for teams that have four players who know how to handle the ball, cut hard to the hoop, spot cutters, deliver accurate, timely passes, and make good decisions on when to go for the basket.
Chesterton’s boys basketball team has four guards who check all those boxes in seniors Logan Pokorney and Jaylon Watts and juniors Malachi Ransom and Tobias Ray. They combined to execute the four corners in a fashion harmonious enough to make a barbershop quartet envious and the host Trojans defeated Merrillville, 66-53, in a Friday night sectional semifinal.
Tenth-year Trojans coach Marc Urban had his players employ the four corners late in a third quarter in which gifted Merrillville scorer Charles Hardiman, who produced 23 of his game-high 25 points in the second half, was threatening to take over the game.
The tactic helped Chesterton (21-4) advance to today’s 6 p.m. sectional title game at 6 p.m. vs. Valparaiso (14-11) with a 66-53 win over Merrillville on Friday night.
Hardiman is such a crafty, elusive, unconventional scorer that he can rattle off points in a hurry, and there is no telling how he’ll get them. Just when you think he’s driving all the way to the hoop, he’ll throw up a shot, and not necessarily with a convential release. He’ll slither into openings and tap in an offensive rebound.
“He’s good,” said Watts, tasked with guarding him for most of the night. “He’s really good.”
Hardiman scored 10 points in the first four minutes of the third quarter and could see what direction things were headed there, so he had his players spread out of the floor and eat some clock with four players forming a box that covers almost the entire half of a court and whichever of the rotating big man was in the game at any given time played in the middle of the box.
When the ball glanced off a Merrillville player and tumbled out of bounds, Ray took the ball out of bounds under the basket. The called play didn’t work and Ray improvised, throwing the ball off a Merrillville player’s back, catching the ricochet, going up for a shot, making it, getting fouled and completing the three-point play.
“We made a lot of really good plays and at the end of the third quarter we burned a minute-and-a-half to get the and-one,” Urban said.
Chesterton went back to the delay game in the fourth quarter and it helped the Trojans to run out the clock on a surging, relentless Merrillville squad that had chipped into a deficit that had grown as large as 17points to draw as close as 58-51 with 1:43 remaining in the game.
The four corners ate so much clock that Merrillville’s only hope of finishing the comeback effort rested with Chesterton missing its free throws and that didn’t happen.
Ransom (4 for 4), Pokorney and Ray combined to go 8 for 8 from the line in the fourth period.
“We have really good, quick guards and we’re still trying to score, but you spread them out,” Urban said of the four corners. “You use that space and we were able to still score at the rim. Some of it was we were trying to space them out as much as we can, and I wanted to shorten that game there late because I felt we had a good lead, where I wanted to burn some clock because they were scoring easily in a stretch there. So I wanted us to have the ball for more time than them having the ball.”
The game was played in such a steamy gym that players sweated so much that various spots of the floor had to be wiped several times with towels to keep players from slipping.
“Every time I touched the ball it was wet,” Watts said.
Yet, Merrillville’s well-conditioned athletes never seemed to run out of steam.
“They’re never giving up,” Watts said of the Pirates, who finished the season 6-17. “They’re a good team and then down the stretch they just kept going. They never had any stop in their fight, and that’s what makes them a tough team to play.”
Watts and sophomore Bradly Basila shared team scoring honors with 16 points apiece and Pokorney scored 15 points and did a strong job all night of delivering on-target passes to cutters. Junior reserve Gunner Ello again energized the team with strong work on the boards and added five points. Ransom scored all six of his points in the fourth period on a night that the bench contributed 14 points. Ray played a huge part in Chesterton limiting its turnovers and withstood relentless, physical ball pressure bringing the ball up the floor.
“I was proud of our guys,” Urban said. “They found a way to make the plays necessary to win the game and advance in the tournament. So that was a tough win for us.”
Chesterton is favored to win its seventh sectional and fourth with Urban as the head coach.
The Trojans routed visiting Valparaiso 75-33 on Feb. 20, when Pokorney in the first half scored 20 of his 23 points and made 6 of his 7 3-pointers.
Nobody expects to see the same Valpo team tonight. As Ray put it, the Trojans will face “a team that’s going to make sure that that doesn’t happen again. We just have to continue doing what we’re doing and play together.”
Urban expressed similar sentiments.
“The game’s going to start 0-0 and we’ve been in positions too where we’ve gotten blown out by those guys in the regular season and found a way to come back and got it done,” he said. “We respect them. We know that they’re good. They’re a good basketball team. We’ve got to make sure we come in in the morning, have a good walkthrough and then we’ve got to be us. We can’t beat us.”
Urban’s motto: Be us; don’t beat us.