When Todd Schayes unveiled a surprise to his Kent Denver boys basketball team before the state tournament, he did so hoping the obvious message would hit home.
“Play Like Clay,” the fresh shirts said, red lettering against white fabric.
The longtime coach wanted his group to embody its senior point guard, Clay Tierney, as it tried to avenge a 2024 Class 4A boys state title game loss and end the school’s 29-year championship drought.
The subtext was just as obvious: Play like Clay … in his absence. Because Tierney suffered a full tear of his left ACL two weeks ago while playing at the end of the Sun Devils’ regular season.
Except with a couple of days and a surprising bounce in his step, Tierney developed another plan.
Then he refused to be denied.
So, too, did his team.
The “Run Devils” blasted out to an early lead Saturday and held off Colorado Academy for a 71-54 championship-clinching win inside Denver Coliseum. They did so with the engine that powered their frenetic pace all season out there on the floor, knocking down a pair of 3-pointers and doing the kind of stuff point guards do.
Leading. Finding the open man. Deflecting passes. Hitting a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to end the first quarter and another from the corner to punctuate a put-away third-quarter run.
Play like Clay. The Sun Devils did just that. And they celebrated the school’s first championship since 1997 afterward.
“I don’t really have any words for this,” Tierney said. “It was amazing. Just looking around, seeing my teammates. We’ve worked for this. All summer, early mornings and late nights. Just playing as much as we could to get back to this moment. And it all came together.”
Not before it appeared to get ripped away from Tierney.
He thought there was no way he’d convince his parents, coaches and doctors he could play.
He brought his parents to practice to watch him run. He ran sprints at home during the evenings for them to prove he could.
His teammates, too, thought he was nuts.
“I thought he was joking,” said star junior Caleb Fay after a game-high 20 points in the title game.
Instead Tierney got a hard-won thumbs up from a doctor, found a brace with extra support and tightened it as much as he could.
For a couple games, the knee felt fine. By halftime of the title game, it most certainly did not.
“It started hurting really bad,” Tierney said. “I didn’t tell anybody. I was like, ‘I’m going to play the rest of this game. Too late at this point.’”
Schayes has been at this since 1994. In the decades since the 1997 title, his teams have been consistently good but lost four times in state championship games.
When the drought finally ended, he stood on the court with his hands on his hips, taking in the scene as tears welled.
“It’s been a long 29 years,” Schayes said. “Twenty-nine successful years. In the last 29 years, I’ve gotten married, we have two wonderful children. I have a fantastic sixth-grade teaching job. I’ve had fantastic basketball teams. …
“It hit me that we crossed the finish line.”
The Sun Devils did it in quintessential fashion.
They got 13 of Fay’s 20 in the second half as the Mustangs tried to stay within reach, but the rugged junior had plenty of help. Nine Sun Devils scored, including 15 from senior Elvis Lloyd, and 11 points, six rebounds, three steals and a pair of assists from Gil Schayes.
That kind of balance, depth and togetherness is what the long-time coach says made this group special.
“You had Gil, you had Caleb, you had Devon (Johnson), who is a four-year varsity player,” Schayes said. “So Caleb doesn’t have to put the cape on. … It does take a team and we have eight or nine kids that can put the ball in the basket.”
None more than his point guard, who called the final afternoon of his hoops career, “the best moment of my life.”
“It’s insane,” Schayes added. “I’m going to get emotional. They just want to be there for their teammates.
“It was an act of epic … (a) miracle that he was actually out there.”
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