Moore
HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL
With a rich history of basketball in his bloodlines, Tony Moore is taking the next step with it.
After being an assistant on St. Patrick’s boys basketball staff for five different head coaches, Moore was named the next head coach of the program on Sunday.
He’ll take over for Aaron Rigdon, who left to take a teacher and assistant coaching job at Pike County Central after three seasons as head coach with the Saints.
Moore started with the program in 2004-05 under Tim Sullivan and has been on staff with Andy Arn (2009-13), Matthew Taylor (2013-16), John Kirkpatrick (2016-17) and Rigdon (2017-20).
Prior to his coaching days, he was an instructional leader for kids around Maysville after he graduated from Circleville Bible College (now known as Ohio Christian University) and scored 2,059 points at the NAIA school and was later inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2016.
Moore is a 1990 graduate of Maysville High School and played under Mike Reitz.
“My love of the game is just being able to watch kids progress, tell them how I played and loved the game,” Moore said.
His passion for the game came from his late older brother Pat Moore, the two growing up playing against each other in the front driveway or at the park.
“I remember telling him before he passed, I’d love to be able to coach somewhere some day and be able to play college ball,” Moore said.
Now he’s been able to do both, the Saints gig his first as a head coach.
He’ll inherit a team in a rebuilding phase, with several players that were expected to be back, but have transferred elsewhere. He will have a couple starters back in Chase Walton and Braxton Swanger and a couple others that received playing time last season in Allan Briseno and Garrett Tesmer. After that will be trying to find replacements for six others that either graduated or transferred.
“With a couple of returning starters and some other good players back, we have a little something to work with. We have a couple others that didn’t play last year that will hopefully play this year,” Moore said.
Wins have been hard to come by the past couple of seasons, the Saints going 6-56 the last two years.
Walton was the Saints second leading scorer with 13.1 points per game and the leading returning rebounder with eight boards per game. Briseno and Swanger averaged 4.1 points per game last season while Tesmer was at 1.9.
“My style of basketball with the players we got, we get the ball off the board, we’re going to run. If not, we’ll run a dribble-drive offense,” Moore said.
There’s about four weeks until official practice begins on October 26. Moore said he’d like to get some conditioning in with the group in the meantime leading into the season.
”A lot of them have been coming to my house this summer. We lifted weights and did some conditioning, we’ll be doing a lot of that the first couple of weeks,” Moore said.
The Saints season is slated to begin on November 24 when they host Covington Latin, according to the KHSAA website.
