Taylor Denney, the head boys basketball coach at Cumberland County High School, just shook his head and smiled Tuesday night after he watched freshman Huston Torres score 33 points in a 43-33 victory over DeKalb County in Crossville.
It isn’t new territory for the CCHS rookie. The talented shooter has already reached the 30-point mark earlier this year. What made it even more impressive was DeKalb County ran a rotation of players in the game to guard Torres.
“I see it from him every day in practice,” said Denney. “Huston is the first one in and the last one to leave.. He’s got great control of the ball at his pace. You can’t really speed him up and I thought he was very good getting to his spots tonight. He played really well for us.”
The win pushes Cumberland County to 5-17 on the season and 1-5 in Class 3A, District 7 action. DeKalb County falls to 9-13 and 1-5 in league play.
“This feels really good and I feel so good for the guys,” Denney said. “They’ve worked so very hard. They’ve tried to do everything we’ve asked them to do, but we haven’t been able to reward ourselves for that just yet.
“Tonight, it was really great to see how excited the guys were as they see all that hard work is finally paying off.”
Cumberland County came out shooting in the first half, and behind Torres’ hot hand, the Jets led 10-7 at the end of the first period and 22-19 at the intermission.
“We went into the game really trying to limit [DeKalb County star] Connor Close because he is really good,” Denney said. “We gave up a few offensive rebounds to them early, but I thought we did a good job of matching their physicality late in the game. We changed defenses a lot tonight, which I thought helped us, and we executed very well.”
Denney said his halftime speech to his team was that it won the first half, but he wanted them to work to finish the game. He said he knew DeKalb County would come out with guns blaring.
Leading 22-19 heading into the second half, Cumberland County scored the first five points, all by Torres, to make it 27-19. DCHS got a bucket inside, but Torres answered with a 3-point play. The Tigers scored the last five points of the period to make it 31-29.
The two teams exchanged buckets early in the fourth period before Cumberland County went on a 10-2 run to close out the game.
The Jets scored mostly on free throws, but Torres, Sol Sitton and Nolen Carter all contributed to the offensive surge and the CCHS win.
Besides Torres’ 33 points, Cumberland got 5 from Sitton, 3 from Carter and 2 from Asher Mifflin.
Close led DeKalb County with 9 points.
“This is definitely a confidence booster,” Denney said. “We’ve worked really hard to try and get to this point. You tell the guys it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. And it happens! But I don’t think we have any satisfied guys in there. They want to go get it again.”