ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, BACK-TO-BACK CHAMPIONSHIPS
Mainland boys upset everyone, take O.T. thriller over the Prep
GALLOWAY – The Mainland Regional boys basketball team pulled off the unthinkable Saturday afternoon, stunning St. Augustine Prep 58-56 for the Cape-Atlantic League championship.
“It’s unbelievable,” head coach Dan Williams said. “I have to believe that some of it is, being sophomores, they’re not nervous like this is the last chance. They know there’s more potential opportunity, or maybe they just don’t know any better because they didn’t have this last year. So I’m not sure, but we’ll take it.”
The Mustangs’ unprecedented run began with a disputed wild card berth which gave them the No. 8 seed in the eight-team tournament. They took advantage of by knocking off the top seed, Egg Harbor Township, in the first round, 50-38.
They parlayed that boost in confidence into another upset of No. 4 seed St. Joseph in the semifinal round, 45-35.
From there, as Jake Taylor would say, “There was only one thing left to do – win the whole ****** thing.”
The Mustangs silenced any notion they weren’t supposed to be in the CAL tournament, but played with the looseness of a team playing with house money – a dangerous recipe for any opponent.
“Hopefully we’ve put that debate to bed,” Williams joked, “but how to sum it all up, I have no idea. I’m impressed by the guys, a little bit shocked and stunned. I’m a little bit speechless here.”
“It’s awesome,” sophomore Cohen Cook said. “I don’t think anybody here thought we were going to get out of the first round. But we’re here and it’s great. Our first CAL championship ever.” Cook was named the championship’s MVP.
Mainland’s balanced lineup was on full display, wreaking havoc on the Hermits – Cook’s scoring ability, Christian Rodgers’ and Stephen Ordille’s play-making, Tim Travagline’s outside shooting, Jamie Tyson’s defense.
They needed everyone’s contributions to pull out the shocking overtime win.
“It’s awesome, it really is awesome,” Williams said of the effort and cohesion his team has shown all season. “You have no idea what to expect with younger kids like that. But they all bought into that and it all worked naturally because the only one that really wants to handle the ball is Christian, the only two guys that really like going in there and doing all the dirty work are Jamie and Cook, then you have Tim who loves to be the offensive threat that he is, Stephen loves the role of being the defensive guy on the perimeter. That was before anything the staff did. That was just them taking ownership of those roles.”
The Mustangs started off cold from the field as the Hermits carved out a modest lead.
Mainland’s pesky defense kept it close while their shooters found their footing.
The Prep led 13-6 after the first quarter.
But the Mustangs answered with an excellent second quarter, outscoring the Hermits 17-9 in the frame.
Travagline heated up with a pair of three-pointers in the second, one from each wing, amid a flurry of threes for Mainland.
At the other end their savvy defense baited the Hermits into offensive fouls, all of it adding up to a 23-22 Mustang lead at intermission.
“It goes back to their resiliency and toughness,” Williams said. “All those cliches a coach says – ‘You fight ‘till the end’ and all that – that’s what they did. It’s what they’ve done for most of the season.”
Mainland came out of the break just as strong as Travagline and Cook helped build the lead.
“The first half I think I only hit one shot,” Cook said, “but the second half I started hitting my shots and feeling more confident.”
Their student section erupted as St. Augustine was forced to call timeout trailing 39-30.
The Mustangs led by 8 to start the final quarter.
“The pregame (speech) wasn’t anything about the whole tournament or anything like that,” Williams said. “It was about the tempo of the game. Same thing with St. Joe’s – tempo, not letting them run out and score big. Then this was the first one we talked about potential outcome. Even then we said if we could stay close, if the score is close at halftime, maybe we put them in a position because of their record where they haven’t really played from behind at all. Now, obviously, I was wrong because they did a great job playing from behind and put us in a tough spot.”
Mainland led by as much as 11 in the fourth quarter before the Hermits made their push.
Hermit Semaj Bethea kept his team in it with a series of acrobatic finishes through contact.
Midway though the final quarter the lead was trimmed to 49-44.
With less than a minute-and-a-half remaining it held steady at 5.
“We were just playing great as a team at the end,” Cook said. “The whole game really we were working well as a team, getting each other open shots.”
Down the stretch, though, the Mustangs couldn’t close it out from the free throw line.
With St. Augustine forced to foul in the final minute, three different Mainland players had a chance to push their lead to two possessions but did not convert.
This left the door open for Bethea to knock down a miracle shot.
With defenders draped all over him and the clock running down, Bethea pulled up from the right wing and hit an off-balance three to send it to overtime.
“I don’t know how he did it,” Cook said. “I saw him do it against Holy Spirit in the semis. I don’t know … it was crazy.”
Regulation ended, 51-51.
Fortunately, the Mustangs still had something left in the tank.
“Honestly, they got me refocused because I wasted the first half of that time telling them how sorry I was,” Williams said. “I told them how annoyed I was with myself for not calling a timeout when Christian was at the line. I was debating, ‘Do I ice him by calling, but tell them we’re up three and we want to foul and not let them get that opportunity? Or do I call it after the first one without icing him?’ I debated too long and never got it. So they picked me up in the huddle. They said, ‘Coach, we’re just going to go back to basics. We’ll start in that 2-3 because the big kid is coming out, and we’ll see if we can’t get on top. If we do we still have the mismatch with Cohen because Brown had (4) fouls.’”
The Hermits quickly took a slim lead to begin the extra frame, but Cook simply took over from there.
“We have one particular play where we get 21 (Ife Okebiorun) out on Tyson and Cohen is left underneath,” Williams said, “and we were able to do that and get on top a little bit.”
He went to work in the post and knocked down clutch free throws to inch his team ahead.
“I’ve got to knock these down, I don’t want to give them another chance like I did the first time,” Cook said.
In the waning seconds trailing by two, Bethea had a much better look at a three that would have won it for the Hermits, but this one fell just off-target and the Mustangs had officially pulled off the unthinkable.
“I’m wondering if he’s been practicing that shot,” Cook said, shaking his head.
At 14-10 coming in, Mainland knocked off St. Augustine Prep, which came in with a 22-2 record.
“We just kept playing as a team the whole time,” Cook said. “It slipped away for a little bit there, but we kept playing as a team and got it done.”
As the final horn sounded, what was Cook thinking?
“This right here,” Cook replied, referring to the press scrum. “I didn’t want to get interviewed. I don’t like talking.”
“He’s a beast,” Williams said. “He can score from outside, he can score from inside off the dribble, he will do anything you ask him to do – literally, I think if we told him to go run through that wall he’d do it. That’s the kind of kid he is, never one complaint. It starts in practice. People don’t want to go up against him in practice because he is relentless. It just spills over into the game.”
Cook was named MVP of the game with his 26 points and 6 rebounds.
Travagline chipped in 11 and had three rebounds. Tyson and Rodgers had 8 points each with Tyson just ahead in rebounds with 4. Stephen Ordille had 3 points and 3 rebounds, and Owen Meade added 2 points. Elijah Brown and Matt Kouser led the Prep with 17 each and Bethea 16. Brown also pulled down 10 rebounds.
The Mustangs look to keep surprising people as they started their playoff run at home against Westhampton Tech Tuesday after the Sentinel sports section went to press. The Mustangs are the No. 6 seed in the South Jersey Group III tournament.
By KYLE McCRANE/Sentinel Sports
Mainland girls roll past Wildwood Catholic, making it a two-title day
GALLOWAY – The Mainland Regional girls basketball team made it a double-header of league titles for the school Saturday afternoon, following up the Mustang boys victory with a 54-38 win over Wildwood Catholic in their Cape-Atlantic League championship game.
The girls game featured less drama than the boys overtime thriller, but was no less impressive as the top-seeded Mustangs led wire to wire.
Mainland’s defense set the tone early, forcing turnovers and giving up nothing easy.
“Defense will make our offense better,” senior Kaitlyn Boggs said. She was named the championship’s MVP.
“When we work harder on defense, that fuels us. When Kasey (Bretones) gets a steal, we hype her up and get down the other end. It makes us more excited to knock down shots like the Mazurs (twin sophomores Ava and Bella) do and things like that. So our defense just fuels us to be better on offense. That’s what helped us today.”
Mainland led 11-5 after the first quarter.
In the second Boggs continued to assert herself on both ends of the floor, pulling down rebounds and owning the post.
“We worked really hard in practice,” Boggs said. “We made some new plays yesterday to get me and shooters open to make it more difficult for them. They can’t shut down the shooters because I’ll be open, they can’t shut me down because the shooters will be open. We just really wanted to push that on them.
“If you leave me open, I’ll go score. If you leave Ava, Bella, Cam (Dirkes), any of our guards uncovered, they’ll go score.”
While Mainland’s shooting wasn’t as sharp as they may have liked, everything else made up for it.
“I liked the way we played defensively,” coach Scott Betson said. “They missed a lot of shots, thankfully, because we gave up some good ones that I would have preferred not to. Looking at their scorers and the way we’ve been scoring I was hoping we’d be into the 50s and keep them somewhere in the 30s. That was exactly how it panned out.”
The Mustangs took a 24-12 lead into halftime.
The Crusaders came out of the break strong and began to trim the lead.
A string of turnovers saw Mainland’s lead cut to 26-21.
“They did some different things defensively and we were just making some bad decisions with the ball,” Betson said. “A couple turnovers, a couple really quick shots. But then we got out athletically and made some great plays, a couple plays in transition to extend it back out.”
Late in the third quarter the Mustangs were able to adjust and retake control.
“It was really just staying dialed in,” Boggs said. “We still had a lead. We were starting to stress out and we didn’t want that to affect the way we were playing on offense or defense. We said we just had to play our game, because once we let them start getting out on a run we weren’t going to be able to get it back. We wanted to be able to play our game, and we’d be able to stay in it.”
Mainland has been dangerous all season on the fast break, but had to find another way to score in this one.
Boggs’ presence in the post helped open things up.
“We didn’t run transition very well today,” Betson said. “I thought the most effective we were was when we had the lead and they had to extend. It was like we were in transition where we just pushed the ball up the court. That’s where we’ve been most effective all year.”
“Every day I just want to work my hardest, with or without the ball,” Boggs said. “I just try to get open to make it easier for the guards. In the second half they were crashing in on me more and it got more of our shooters open. It makes everyone’s lives easier, so every game I just want to go in there and try my hardest to do that. Today I was able to.”
Boggs finished with 19 points to go with 10 rebounds on the day. Wildwood Catholic’s Kimmy Casiello had 13 points and teammate Ava Vogds had 8 rebounds.
Ava Mazur had 10 points and 2 rebounds for the Mustangs, Bretones had 9 points and 5 rebounds, Dirkes contributed 7 points and 5 rebounds and Bella Mazur had 7 points and 4 rebounds. Sydney Stokes added 2 points and McKenna Pontari had 2 rebounds.
“We talked about it coming in, we were expecting (Boggs) to have a big game,” Betson said. We thought we had an advantage because of her size and the way she’s been playing the past couple weeks. She was a dominant force against Holy Spirit right before the tournament, and had a really strong outing against EHT (Egg Harbor Township) in the first round. So we were depending on her to be that today.”
With Mainland leading by double-digits late, Wildwood Catholic was forced to bomb away from beyond the arc to no avail.
The Mustangs’ defense and rebounding took them the rest of the way to victory and a league championship.
“It means everything, of course, to be able to just go work our butts off and do this,” Boggs said. “We haven’t won this in four years, so it means a lot because we’ve worked so hard this season.”
Now the Mustangs hope to carry this momentum into the playoffs.
“We always want more,” Boggs said. “This is one accomplishment, but we’re always working to push to states and even farther than that if we can.”
The Mainland girls are the No. 1 seed in the Group III South Jersey sectional tournament. They opened the playoffs Tuesday evening after the Sentinel went to press.
By KYLE McCRANE/Sentinel Sports
