The boy’s basketball team made an early exit from the Louisville Invitational Tournament (LIT) as Bullitt East upset the Crimsons in a 59-56 thriller at Valley High School.

With 17.7 seconds left, Manual had a chance down one; however, Tyler Bacon of Bullitt East blocked Dewayne Sutton’s (12, #22) layup attempt.

“I went baseline,” Sutton said. “I thought I got fouled, but I got to keep playing. I should’ve fought through the contact. It was a good game overall though.”

Manual was down 47-36 with 2:55 left in the third quarter when the Crimson bench sparked an 18-2 run, giving them a 54-49 lead midway through the fourth quarter. Manual had 16 bench points, with eight of those coming in the run.

“Most of our bench is made up of a group of juniors, along with Ty‘Ron Horton (12, #24),” said Eric Niemann (11, #33). “We just all try to play together, play defense as hard as we can and do what our coach tells us to do.”

“We did several things to get ourselves back in it,” head coach Jimmy Just (Math) said. “We played some good defense for a while and got some stops finally which we weren’t doing and we did a good job of moving the ball on offense to get better shots. When we did that I thought that we played pretty well. It’s just that we aren’t doing that consistently, and that’s the problem.”

Manual sputtered down the stretch as the Crimsons failed to convert late game opportunities.

“We just need to do what coach tells us to do,” Niemann said. “He puts us in a position, but we’re just not executing right now. Towards the end of practices we tend to kind of slack off and lose attention, so we need to throughout the full practice be focused and do exactly what coach tells us to do.”

Throughout the game, Manual’s lack of size hurt the Crimsons, and they struggled to deal with the height disadvantage.

“We knew that there would be some disadvantages on height but we thought that we had some advantages in some other ways,” Just said. “It’s just a matter of seeing how it all played out.”

Manual wanted to try to speed up the Chargers with its full court press, but were only able to force 12 turnovers in the game. When they did get the opportunity, the Crimsons took advantage by having 16 points off turnovers.

“We started playing harder on defense, kept getting a lot of rebounds,” Sutton said. “Tyler Bacon was a beast, and we were able to apply a little bit of pressure and get some steals that lead to easy transition buckets.”

Manual also had a surprising success on the boards, as the Crimsons out rebounded Bullitt East 39-30.

“We had everyone go to the boards this game,” Sutton said. “Usually, we have about four, but in this game we sent everyone onto the boards, even our small guards, and that helped a lot.”

However, Manual had no answer for Bullitt East star Tyler Bacon. The six foot nine inch senior had 17 points and three blocks, including the block on Sutton in the game’s final seconds.

“Coach told us before that our advantage was in our speed and their advantage was with their height,” Niemann said. “So what we tried to do is work around them and be in help and attack them off the dribble, as well as isolations with their big guys against our smaller guys.”

Manual struggled to shoot the ball offensively throughout the game, shooting only 35.6 percent from the field. This was primarily due to bad shot selection against the Charger zone.

“We gotta learn how to attack the zone in different ways: short corner, baseline and hit our shots when we get our chances,” Sutton said. “We had to penetrate and kick because we know that they’re pretty big inside, so we have to find gaps and spaces in the zone.”

The loss drops Manual to 14-3 on the season. The Crimsons will get a second crack at Bullitt East this Tuesday when the two teams rematch at Manual.