50 After 50: Pain of loss in super-sectional still something No. 30 Wildcats cannot shake

The Illinois High School Association created a second class for boys basketball for the 1971-72 school year. The 2020-21 season would have been the 50th year of the boys basketball small-school tournament. Muddy River Sports is celebrating 50 years of small-school boys basketball by ranking the 50 best teams in Adams, Brown, Pike and Hancock counties since 1972.

No. 30 — Warsaw 1985-86

WARSAW, Ill. — It has been nearly 36 years and Steve Rothert’s high school scrapbook remains unfinished.

“My mom didn’t have the heart to put the Winchester game in there,” he said. “And I never will.”

Clearly, the pain of a second consecutive heart-breaking loss in the Class A Macomb Super-sectional to deny the Warsaw Wildcats a berth in the 1986 state tournament in Champaign has not subsided.

Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds.

Forget the 19-game winning streak and the then-school record 26 victories. Forget the West-Central Conference championship and the Hancock County Tournament title. Forget beating Quincy Notre Dame for the second straight season in the sectional.

Winchester 53, Warsaw 49.

“Somewhere along the line, usually in conversation, Winchester comes up (when players and coaches from that team gather),” said Dan Lucey, Warsaw’s coach. “Then we’ll look at each other and shut up.”

The Wildcats had set their sights on reaching the Assembly Hall from the moment John Tanner’s fall-away jumper from the circle nestled in the net with five seconds remaining in the super-sectional the year before to give Pittsfield a 49-47 victory.

Rothert, Warsaw’s 6-foot-7 center who earned an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, added 15 pounds of muscle by lifting weights during the offseason.

He averaged 16.5 points and 8.8 rebounds per game as a junior and improved those lines to 19.9 points and 10.4 rebounds a game as a senior despite being the focal point of every defense.

“Steve was one of the hardest workers I’ve ever had,” Lucey said. “He wasn’t a great natural athlete, but he was so smart … and he worked and worked and worked, and that was the key to his success.”

With forward Todd Hardy and guard Brad Lucey also returning as starters and forward Brian Froman and guards Ross McMillen and Billy Reynolds pegged for important roles, the Wildcats were considered among the area’s best bets to reach the Elite Eight.

And then they played Hamilton in mid-December and lost 70-66.

“The best thing that ever happened to us that year,” Dan Lucey said. “It got us back to reality. You go back and say, ‘Hey, you guys aren’t near as good as you thought you were. We’ve got to get back to work.’ ”

Warsaw avenged that loss in the second round of the Western-Macomb Holiday Tournament, beating the Cardinals 70-63. The Wildcats would advance to the tourney championship game, losing 43-40 to Pittsfield to fall to 7-2.

They wouldn’t lose again until March, but not without some last-second heroics.

Warsaw and Hamilton — separated by just 5 miles — met four times during the regular season, with the Wildcats winning three by a combined 10 points.

In early January, Rothert scored 31 points, but it was Froman’s 12-footer at the buzzer that enabled the Wildcats to rally from eight points down to win 62-60.

Then, in the finals of the Hancock County Tournament later that month, Rothert’s late underhanded tip-in with his left hand forced overtime and Reynolds won it 67-66 with a baseline jumper with four seconds left.

“We knew Hamilton could beat us,” Rothert said. “They beat us the first time and we knew every time we played them that they could ruin our season. We had hopes for Champaign, but we knew it would be tough to get out of the regional.”

It was no surprise that the teams squared off for a fifth time in the finals of the Dallas City Regional. And it was fitting that Rothert put together one of the finest games of his career.

With Warsaw clinging to an 11-10 lead with four minutes to go in the first quarter, he scored 18 of his team’s next 25 points and assisted on another basket to help propel the Wildcats to a 40-33 halftime lead they never relinquished.

Hamilton averaged an area-best 73.4 points per game and shot 57 percent from the field during the regular season but was no match for Rothert on this night. He finished with 34 points and 13 rebounds and Warsaw dominated the boards (39 to 25) en route to a 71-60 victory.

That sent Warsaw to the sectional at Bushnell-Prairie City to face QND. The Wildcats opened a 46-35 lead on Rothert’s three-point play with 6:41 to go, but he went to the bench with his fourth foul seconds later and the Raiders reeled off 10 unanswered points to pull within one.

“Coach put me back in and said, ‘Go win this game,’ ” Rothert said.

Rothert hit a short jumper with 1:13 to go and added six free throws in the final 18 seconds to seal a 56-49 victory. He scored 21 of his team’s 25 points in the second half, including 15 in the fourth quarter, to finish with 27.

In the sectional championship game against Bath-Balyki, the lead changed hands 11 times and the game was tied on six occasions during the opening 12 minutes. Heavily favored Warsaw then scored the final nine points of the half to go up 34-25.

“Coach was probably thinking what in the heck was wrong with us when we were trailing, but we were clapping going into the locker room at halftime,” Rothert said. “We told him, ‘We got it, coach, we got it.’ ”

The Wildcats came out and scored the first nine points of the second half to complete an 18-0 run over nine clock minutes, and the rout was on. Rothert finished with 28 points and 13 rebounds in an 80-51 victory.

“I looked up at the scoreboard one time and said to my assistant, ‘Is that lead 31 points,’ ” Dan Lucey said. “It just happened so fast.”

That earned Warsaw a return trip to the super-sectional against Winchester, which had bounced Pittsfield in the regional.

“We felt good going into the super-sectional because Pittsfield wasn’t there,” Rothert said. “We had never beaten them. Maybe that made us overconfident.

“I had a sinking feeling most of the game, like a bad dream. We couldn’t get out of our own way.”

Winchester packed the lane defensively to stop Rothert. Even though he sat out the final 4:21 of the first quarter with two fouls, he finished with 23 points and 10 rebounds.

However, Warsaw never found its rhythm offensively and last led at 12-10. Impatient, it turned the ball over 21 times, including on three straight possessions after it had whittled an eight-point deficit to two with five minutes remaining. Its perimeter shooting never materialized.

Winchester pushed the lead back to eight and took the air out of the ball, forcing Warsaw to foul. Winchester sank 9 of 11 free throws in the final 1:50 and 17 of 19 overall.

Winchester 53, Warsaw 49.

“We played about as bad as we could,” Dan Lucey said. “It’s not the best two-out-of-three or four-out-of-seven. You get one shot at it.

“We had two shots at (getting to state) and just didn’t get it done.”

Rothert went on to play four seasons at Army and serve three years as a field artilleryman before being discharged. He returned to school and simultaneously earned his medical and law degrees and is now employed as a doctor by the State Department. He is stationed in Ankara, Turkey.

He still remembers sitting in Assembly Hall with his teammates during the 1986 state tournament watching Winchester lose to Hoopeston-East Lynn in the quarterfinals.

“It was heart-breaking,” Rothert said. “We would’ve been fine against Hoopeston. We had played against those guys during the summer.

“When Warsaw eventually won (the state championship in 1997) with Billy Heisler and those guys, we were happy for them. We were also jealous of that team.

“Every team except one has a bad end to a season. We could have gone farther.”