Staff photo / Neel Madhavan Warren G. Harding’s Xavier Clark slam dunks on the ball after a fast break on Friday night against Ursuline in Youngstown.

YOUNGSTOWN — Going against one of the best players in northeast Ohio, Warren G. Harding wanted to make sure it got the ball out of Ursuline star Jaylen Gunther’s hands on Friday night.

Even though Gunther went off for 28 points, the Raiders did just enough defensively to pull out a 55-52 victory over the Fighting Irish in Youngstown.

“He’s an elite scorer. He’s as good as it gets at the high school level in the state of Ohio,” Harding coach Keelyn Franklin said. “So we wanted to make other guys beat us, which they have the capability of doing. We just felt like if we could get the ball out of his hands and make everybody else make plays throughout the course of the game that maybe they haven’t had to make in the past, we liked our chances.”

With how the Raiders came after Ursuline defensively, Harding forced the Irish to have to work for everything it got, as Ursuline shot just 31.1% from the floor for the game.

Even as the Raiders keyed on Gunther, he still provided the bulk of Ursuline’s offense in the first half, scoring 15 of the team’s 17 first-half points.

Throughout the night, Harding face-guarded Gunther with several different defenders off the ball, while bringing double teams and traps whenever he touched the ball. That forced him to have to give up the ball and try to find the open man against the double teams.

“We’ve seen it in every game so far. They’re trying to get the ball out of his hands,” Ursuline coach Keith Gunther said. “I think the difference between this game and the last game is when we were moving the ball out of his hands, we made shots. This game, I thought we struggled to make some open looks, and I thought we turned the ball over a lot.”

Ursuline led by one (9-8) at the end of the first quarter, but with Jaylen Gunther the only one able to make shots for the Irish in the first half, Harding took a 22-17 lead at halftime.

After a scoreless first half, Noah Bell finally got going in the third quarter for the Irish. He scored 11 of his 14 points during the period, as Ursuline tied the game at 29 with a couple minutes left in the third.

But the Raiders ended the quarter on an 8-3 run, which gave them a 37-32 lead heading into the fourth quarter.

“They punched us in the mouth initially to start the game,” Franklin said. “Tons of offensive rebounds. We weren’t competing on the glass. They’re a scrappy team. It was a war, and I just think our toughness was the difference tonight.”

Even as Ursuline kept trying to claw back, Harding kept the pressure on by scoring on the other end.

The Raiders had a balanced scoring effort, led by 17 points from Xavier Clark. Asa Burch provided a boost for Harding in the post, finishing with 14 points, while Khi Blutcher scored all 10 of his points in the second half.

“It helps a lot because we have post scoring and we have guys that can score on the perimeter,” Franklin said of the team’s depth. “We can do it in a variety of ways. Ursuline was a smaller team, so we wanted to post them up as much as possible. Then if we play a team that doesn’t have really good guards, we can pressure them. There’s just a lot of different things we can do with this group. As we go throughout the year, we’ll add in some different stuff. But the main recipe is being a competitor and I thought we were competitors.”

Ursuline struggled to cut the deficit below five, until the final two minutes when Jaylen Gunther knocked down a pair of late threes to tighten things up.

However, the Raiders did just enough at the free-throw line in the final minute to close things out.

“I think we’ve got to figure out a better game plan for what we’re trying to do when teams are trapping Jay and trying to deny Noah,” Keith Gunther said. “So I gotta do a better job, it’s not just the kids. I thought Clark made a lot of good plays, I thought Asa Burch made a lot of good plays. We were questioning their guard play, but their guards actually handled the ball decent.

“It was a good ball game, a good high school ball game, good early-season game. We got out early, they got out late and in between. I just think we gotta be better. We gotta be better coaches, we gotta be better defensively and learn how to play against these double teams.”