Lone senior leading the charge for Carroll at state

Carroll is the only team in Class 5A with its boys and girls teams playing Friday for spots in the state finals.

The teams have a combined two seniors, and Ashton McCorry is one of them.

The Golden Eagles had five seniors on the girls team last season. They were the sixth seed entering the state tournament and lost in the first round to eventual champion St. Thomas Aquinas. Few expected Carroll to improve.

Instead, the Eagles won their sub-state tournament and came to Topeka as the No. 4 seed. Friday, they seek Carroll's first state final appearance since 2008.

McCorry averages 6.7 points. She isn't the most prolific scorer on the team, but she is the leader.

"I kinda look at them like they're my kids almost," McCorry said. "But I don't look at the freshmen and think 'You're a freshman; you're below me.' We're all on the same level. We're all on the same playing field.

"Everyone is on varsity for a reason."

Carroll beat Schlagle 77-56 in the state quarterfinals Thursday. The game got chippy, and it started with a play McCorry was involved in.

Schlagle threw an inbounds pass to midcourt, and McCorry clipped the player the pass was intended for. The play looked violent, but McCorry was trying to deflect the pass out of bounds. Schlagle's player was injured.

A fan from the near sideline shouted at McCorry as she walked by, saying she was a "dirty player."

McCorry gave the fan a thumbs up.

Other Schlagle players got involved and it ended in a technical foul, two foul shots for Carroll and a 10-point lead. The sequence completely changed the game.

Before the technical foul, Carroll had squandered a 17-point advantage to just a two-point lead in the third quarter. Schlagle received two more technical fouls after the first and seemed to self-destruct on its way to a 21-point loss.

It started with a thumbs up -- not a comment -- from Carroll's only senior. McCorry is the rallying point, coach Taylor Dugan said.

McCorry is a quiet maestro on the court. She has command of the offense in the high post. At 6-foot-1, she is Carroll's tallest player but demonstrates finesse that most posts can't guard. She is the Eagles' fifth-leading scorer, but her distribution is comparable to point guard Allison McFarren's.

She works in unison with Carroll's top scorer, Britney Ho, who finished fourth in City League points this season. A 6-foot junior, Ho has touch around the basket and superb footwork. She is often who the Eagles look to when they need a bucket, but she said the reason for their success this season is their unselfishness.

"We have a lot of people stepping up because it's hard for her to pick up the slack of 11 other girls," Ho said. "But we're dependent on the upperclassmen to do that. Her being the lone senior, it's tough, but she does a pretty good job at it."

There are parallels between the Carroll boys and girls teams because of that same reason.

The boys team's offense works like a machine, and when all of the gears are turning, it's almost impossible to stop with the volume of backdoor cuts and re-cuts to the basket.

The Carroll boys seem to have a different leading scorer each night, and that's how the girls play, too.

In the girls' past five games, four players have led in scoring.

"My goal was to get everyone back to the state tournament, so everyone would have the same opportunity I had my freshman year," McCorry said. "That's been really important to me, and guiding and helping people understand our system and just making sure that when I leave, they're still gonna be strong."

Luke Evans is the boys' lone senior this season. He, like McCorry, is not the Eagles' leading scorer. He serves as more of a point-forward with his back to the basket. He, like McCorry, is a distributor and the orchestrator .

Carroll has not been known as a basketball school. The boys have no state championships, and the girls have only one, in 2004. But however unlikely it seemed at the start of the season, Carroll is mathematically the school most likely to bring a trophy back to Wichita.

The girls play No. 1 Liberal at 6:30 p.m. Friday . The boys will be on the court the game before, at 3 p.m. vs. Mill Valley. Dugan said it is a special time to be able to watch the boys compete and then play for a spot in the state title.

"I think it's fun for the girls and the guys and for the school to come together," Dugan said. "We do whatever we can to keep the ball rolling every night."

This story was originally published March 9, 2018 at 1:40 PM with the headline "Lone senior leading the charge for Carroll at state."