Rodney Thweatt needed Hillsboro to play the Burro way, but team getting closer | Kreager

MURFREESBORO – This one hurt.

It really hurt.

But Hillsboro boys basketball coach Rodney Thweatt saw this day coming. Oh, he hoped he was wrong. He hoped what he'd seen all season would change and the grit and discipline — trademarks of the Burro way in his tenure would appear.

That's when Hillsboro would be a true contender for its first TSSAA gold ball basketball trophy.

But it never showed up. Memphis Overton beat Hillsboro 71-61 Friday at Middle Tennessee State's Murphy Center in a Class 4A semifinal in the TSSAA BlueCross Boys Basketball State Championships.

Memphis Overton (32-11) plays Independence (33-4) at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in the championship. Independence beat Memphis East 78-58 in their semifinal.

"Ever game, every step we made it was like, 'Wow, it's unbelievable,' because I never really felt like we were at our best or ever played our best this year," Thweatt said. "I knew it would eventually get us.

"It would have been nice to flip a switch and come in and say this is what we're going to do now. But we haven't done it all year. We were good enough (to win games)."

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Thweatt can point to the loss of senior Caden Herron, who was the Burros' best player entering the 2022-23 season. He was being recruited to play college basketball. Herron, though, was paralyzed from the waist down in August when he was ejected from an automobile when it wrecked.

Hillsboro (28-5) played just one senior against Memphis Overton in Trey Johsnon, who scored 18 points and hit three 3-pointers. Junior Arnez Anderson led the Burros with 20 points. Jordan Frison had a game-high 36 points on 10-of-11 shooting along with 13-of-14 from the free throw line. Teammate Jailyen Hardaway had 20.

"We were working hard," Johnson said. "I remember (last year) in the regional when we lost. We came back that next day and started working to get to this point where we were at now. We wanted to go further.

"We played this Memphis Overton team in the summer. And we beat them."

But Johnson said this time some didn't have their "A game." Others were looking at the scoreboard.

And now, the season is over.

Now, it's time to turn to the offseason and build on the discipline.

"I think this is going to push the narrative of what we have to be," Thweatt said. "We probably are one of the smallest 4A players in the state. We have to be extremely tough and discipline. Quite frankly, those last two terms is something this group didn't quite buy into.

"They wanted to outscore people and play the scoreboard and play with different levels of energy based upon what the score was and wanted to slide by."

Reach Tom Kreager at 615-259-8089 or tkreager@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Kreager.