Bishop Ready’s undefeated season ends in state semifinals

For 28 games this season, Bishop Ready’s players and coaches were living the dream.

Undefeated. Ranked No. 1 in the state in Division II. Program records for wins in a season and consecutive victories. Central Catholic League (CCL), district and regional championships. First trip to the state semifinals in nine years and the school’s sixth overall. 

Everything was going great. And then, in a span of a little more than an hour, it wasn’t.

Bidding for the school’s first state title in boys basketball since winning back-to-back championships in 1972 and 1973, the Silver Knights started slowly in their semifinal matchup against Akron Buchtel on Friday, March 17 in the University of Dayton Arena before battling back valiantly but never quite catching up in a 60-50 loss that brought their season to a bittersweet end.

Kaleb Schaffer, one of three Ready seniors, sustained an ankle injury in the first quarter that limited his mobility the rest of the afternoon. The 6-foot-6 All-Central District forward finished with five points, 10 below his season average. 

That was a tough blow to absorb for the Silver Knights.

“He’s the heart and soul of our program,” Ready coach Tony Bisutti said. “He’s a tremendous communicator on the court, and he’s invaluable in making sure guys are where they’re supposed to be.

“He’s a guy we want our players to emulate on the court, and on top of that he’s a 1,000-point career scorer. He knows where the hoop is.”

Fellow seniors Charlie Russell and Luke Ruth did their best to pick up the slack with 19 and 12 points, respectively, against an athletic Buchtel lineup that scored 20 points off 13 Ready turnovers and 40 points from inside the free throw lane. 

Ruth added team bests of eight assists and eight rebounds, and the tenacious 6-2 guard made two free throws with 39 seconds left to narrow the deficit to 54-50 before Buchtel closed out the game with the final six points.

There was nothing more the Silver Knights could do. For only the third time in 29 games, they had allowed an opponent to score more than 50 points.  

“The biggest factor in the game was their points off turnovers,” Bisutti said after the game.

History shows just how difficult it is to win a state championship. In more than 100 years of high school basketball in Ohio, diocesan schools have won 10 titles in all divisions – and four of those were by the now-closed Columbus Father Wehrle starting in the 1980s.

In addition to Ready’s two state titles, the Silver Knights finished second in 2002 and qualified for the final four in 2010 and 2014. The last diocesan school to win a championship was Columbus Bishop Watterson in 2013.

While the loss will continue to sting in the days and weeks ahead, the players and coaches will eventually reflect on the season and embrace their accomplishment.

For the three seniors, the bitter pill might take a little more time to swallow.

This trio of friends had formed the heart and soul of this juggernaut and were hoping to play one more game together in the state final.

“Their commitment to the game was the key,” Bisutti said in reflecting on the season. “They wanted to be good. They wanted to be better.

“Those three have had dreams, and they’re very close friends and they’ve talked about this their whole lives getting to this point and trying to make the most out of it.”

The foundation for Ready’s season goes back five years to the hiring of Bisutti as head coach. After a long and successful run at Dublin Scioto High School, Bisutti retired from teaching but was interested in continuing to coach somewhere.

He looked around, and Ready had an opening. The Columbus St. Francis DeSales graduate had been an assistant coach at his alma mater in 1987 when the Stallions won their only state basketball title and knew the CCL well.

He thought Ready would be a perfect fit – and he was right. In five years at the school, Bisutti has compiled an 87-32 record that includes back-to-back CCL titles and this year’s deep run in the postseason. That brings his overall record in 30 years of coaching to 455-246.

“With this group, it kind of came together as a perfect storm of how I want us to play,” Bisutti said of this season’s 28-1 team. “Over the course of their careers, our players have bought into what we’re trying to do and the way we go about it.

“We’ve had some really, really good basketball players. They really, really care about each other, and how we played this year is a direct reflection of that.” 

Bisutti’s style has meshed well with a school defined by its blue-collar mentality. He preaches hard work, toughness, teamwork and defense, and this year’s team in particular embodied those qualities.

“We start with our core values of how we’re going to respect each other and play for each other and how we’re going to carry ourselves,” he explained. “From day one, our guys have been willing to go through a brick wall for us as far as the physicality part.”

In addition to the three seniors who were each first-team all-district selections, junior Josh Paul and sophomore Kaden Schaffer rounded out the starting five, and key contributors off the bench were junior Micah Germany, sophomore Andreas Gordon and freshman Uthman Sherif.

“We had the potential to win every time out this season,” Bisutti said, “and we found a way to win.

“When you go through the season undefeated, the target becomes immense. It’s on you. Our team was very confident but respectful of our opponents.”

Bisutti and the three seniors also shared a mutual respect for one another.

“He’s meant the world to us,” Russell said of Bisutti. “He spends a lot of time watching film to game-plan and strategize.

“He gets on us, he pushes us, and I think without him we’re not the successful team that we are. He’s a pillar that we can look up to and work toward his standards.”

Asked to describe the defining qualities of this team, the seniors all settled on one word: chemistry.

“And our love for each other – not just us three but everyone on the team,” Russell said. “We’re all good friends outside of school, we hang out, we spent a lot of time together, and that creates a lot of respect for each other. I think that’s what really held us together and helped us to play so well.

“And I think a big part of being successful is being humble. We know that nothing has been given to us. We’ve had to work for it, and we’re going to play our hardest and show our opponents respect.”

The three seniors have played together for so long that by the time their final year rolled around they knew each other’s tendencies and strengths as well as any teammates could.

Their bond traces back to the third grade when they started playing basketball together. Kaleb Schaffer and Ruth attended Grove City Our Lady of Perpetual Help School through eighth grade, and Russell went to public school in the South-Western City School District.

When it came time for high school, Russell decided to join Schaffer and Ruth at Ready, and the choice worked out well.

Russell, a 6-5 forward who is headed to the Air Force Academy to play baseball, took a leap forward as a basketball player this season, averaging a team-leading 17.6 points per game. Ruth averaged over 12 points and four assists per game.

The three seniors also had a hand in Ready playing lockdown defense throughout the season. The Silver Knights held opponents to an average of 40 points per game. 

“We worked on defense in practice, and I think in the CCL in general if you’re not playing tough defense you’re not going to win,” Ruth said. “Every game we weren’t going to be shooting our best, and that’s when you have to rely on defense. If we have good, solid defense, you know you can win.”

“And a lot of times defense translates to really good offense,” Schaffer added. “And so our defense is what really got us going.”

Up until the state semifinal, that kind of defensive tenacity helped Ready advance. In the regional final on March 11 at Ohio University, the Silver Knights trailed Fairfield Union at halftime but rallied in the second half and allowed just two points in the fourth quarter for a 43-33 victory.

“We set big goals at the beginning of the season,” Schaffer said. “As we got farther and farther along and being one of the only undefeated teams left in the state, we knew we had a target on our backs, but we welcomed it with open arms because we knew we were going to get a lot of teams’ best games against us, so it prepared us to make a deep run in the tournament.

“There’s a ton of teams that would have traded places with us to be in our situation. We loved it. It pushed us and made us better.”

The seniors agreed without hesitation that the success of this team hinged in large part on camaraderie.  

“I’ve been a part of really, really good teams,” Schaffer said. “But those good teams haven’t had the chemistry like we had. And that just shows how long we’ve been together and how much we respect each other.

“And that respect just bleeds over to the other teammates and really makes us one big unit.”

Schaffer pointed to a disappointing loss to Columbus Africentric last year in a Division III district final as the launching pad for this season’s run. Ready moved up to Division II before the start of the 2022-23 school year because of the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s competitive balance formula.

“We were obviously sad after that game, and then that sadness turned to motivation,” Schaffer said. “And then we all got in the gym really early last summer and started putting the work in at workouts, and we started thinking this year could be really something special.”

During practices the past four years, the seniors could see hanging above the court on the east end of Joe Lang Gymnasium a banner honoring Ready’s two state basketball championships. They looked up at it often and imagined what it would be like to add to it.

“Luke’s mom does the (score)book, and before every game she gave us a fist bump and just said ‘states,’” Schaffer said. “We’ve been going to Ready games since we were in fifth grade and just always looked up at those two banners and dreamed about being able to put one up here because it’s a special thing.”

The dream didn’t become a reality, but the seniors left their mark on the program and created memories to last a lifetime.

Ruth said, “I’ve never been on a team like this.”