Friendships put on hold when the competition starts

By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff

LINWOOD – Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. It can breed fierce competition and friendship.

When the Ocean City and Mainland girls basketball teams played each other for the South Jersey Group III championship March 10, the girls knew each other well. For the seniors on the team, it was the fourth time in four years they faced each other for the title.

Mainland players left the game in tears as their Ocean City counterparts celebrated, but rest assured both sides will be back to supporting each other again as long as they’re not playing each other.

Ocean City junior Marlee Brestle understands the familiarity all too well, not just because of the rivalry with Mainland. She also has it with her sister, Madison, a senior on the Atlantic City High School basketball team. The Vikings won the Cape-Atlantic League Tournament championship in February, knocking off the Ocean City Red Raiders along the way, 40-33. The Brestles faced each other on the court in that game and in January during the regular season, when Ocean City won, 40-38.

Now, with Madison owning a CAL title and Marlee having a South Jersey title, who has the bigger bragging rights?

“It definitely feel likes it’s us,” Marlee said. “Me and Madison have been going at it since we were little and I feel like this (S.J. title) is a great accomplishment. They (Atlantic City) did great this season. It’s nice to limit Mainland from getting any championships this year. I definitely feel like we have the bigger bragging rights in the family right now,” she laughed. (Mainland was the Group III South Jersey sectional champion and state champion in 2019.)

The younger Brestle, at all of 5’2”, was part of the swarming, double- and triple-teaming defense that stifled 6’4” Mustang Kylee Watson. At one point, it was the diminutive Brestle who was able to stop a Watson shot by tying her up down low and forcing a jump ball.

Brestle enjoyed that.

“I love Kylee, she is one of my good friends,” Brestle said, before adding about the jump ball, “It honestly felt really good. She’s an All-American. Compared to me, it’s kind of funny.

“Before the game and after the game, we’re all friends, but during the game it’s kind of like you flip a switch and you’re not friends any more,” Brestle said. “And then afterwards, you congratulate each other and you can even hang out. It’s a great feeling.”

Brestle noted that she felt better than in last year’s South Jersey final, which Mainland won.

“After last year’s game, getting thrown in there my sophomore year, this is a great feeling compared to that,” she said. “I’m on top of the world right now.”

Senior Emma Finnegan said she and her Red Raider teammates “walked into this game knowing it was one of those games that has happened for four years in a row. This game we went into halftime down by 8 (16-8), and we made a decision, either we were going to let them get to us and have that 8-point lead, or we were going to take control and continue our season. 

“And I think most of us – some of us seniors have been playing together since we were 10 years old – we just have that connection that if one of us gets going, it kind of trickles down to the other ones too,” Finnegan said.  

“I think it just took some time to get into the flow of things,” said fellow senior Abbey Fenton. “It’s a big game … and it’s a big moment for a lot of the girls. We just had to get into the flow and once we started rolling we were looking good.”

She acknowledged it was a defensive battle because of the familiarity between the teams.

“We knew they were going to try to take away our shooting ability. We tried to switch our defenses up on them. We tried to go right to man-to-man. They were trying to run a lot of things with Kylee Watson and we were good on shutting that down,” Fenton said.  (Ocean City held Watson, a McDonald’s All-American and Division I college basketball recruit headed to Oregon, to 3 points, though Watson did make a lot of nice defensive plays, including blocks, to limit the Red Raiders’ scoring as well.)

Two other seniors, Delaney Lappin and Lauren Mirsky, were coming off injuries. For Lappin, it was from the state championship soccer season that sidelined her for two months of basketball, and for Mirsky, it was an injury from a few weeks earlier.

Lappin, an extraordinarily tough athlete, was champing at the bit most of the season.

“I’m totally fine now, but at the beginning of the year it was tough because I was so ready to go into basketball, just coming off a state championship from soccer, and then once I got into basketball season … I realized I hurt my knee. I had to sit out for two months. So when I came back I was ready to go and work hard. 

When she did get in, she went full tilt, never giving up on a play and fiercely wrestling for any ball she could get her hands on. She was happy, to say the least, after posing with the South Jersey sectional title, just a few months after posing with the Group III state championship title from soccer.

“It just feels amazing,” Lappin said. “I can’t even say, just everything we’ve accomplished, everything as a team. With the soccer team, the basketball team, everything is the team. There’s no individuals. We all play as a team. It’s just fun to play together.”

“I have a grade 2 MCL sprain and a bone bruise that happened at the Atlantic City game in the Cape-Atlantic League tournament,” Mirsky said. “I overextended it, so as I continued to play it kept getting worse and worse and towards the end, it was like bone on bone and I really struggled to move and I thought I would be a hindrance.”

That kept her out of the playoff game against Moorestown, but not the South Jersey final.

She only scored one basket in the game, but it came during a crucial late run when Ocean City needed every point it could get.

Hitting that shot, Mirsky said, “is the best feeling in the world.”

As for how she was feeling after the game, she smiled broadly. “The win feels amazing, but the knee feels terrible.”