City of Basketball Love

Andrew Robinson (@ADrobinson3)
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LANSDALE — Meg Sherdian may be the least-heralded of Archbishop Carroll's five starters, but ask any of the other four and quickly it becomes evident how valuable she is.

Consider Thursday night when the Patriots blew past host Lansdale Catholic 62-29 to finish a perfect 10-0 in the PCL regular season. In that game, Sheridan and Taylor Wilson combined for 29 points and were the two most impactful players on the court.

She's Carroll's do-it-all defensive stopper, willing to take on any challenge and a key cog in the Patriots' success even if she'll likely never lead them in scoring.

"Without her, we would not have won these 10 games," Wilson, who had all 29 of the points between the two juniors, said. "Her defense, she guarded Gabby Casey who is an amazing player scoring like 30, 40 points a game and she held her in check tonight and really got in her head which is what really helped us win this game.

"She does that against the best girl on the other team every time and it's such an amazing thing she does."

Calling someone a "team player" can elicit a multitude of definitions. In Sheridan's case, it's just the truth.

The junior guard, who stands about 5-foot-6, says everything she does is a byproduct of what her team does. What's made the Patriots successful is a team approach on both the offensive and defensive end, so there's never strictly a reliance on one person to get everything done on their own so she never feels pressure to not give up any points or never get beat on a play.

Even after a brilliant offensive game where she hit 13-of-17 shots for her 29 points, Wilson said it's rare that one player puts up that kind of total in a single game and she even expected someone else to be the high point scorer in the Patriots' next game. So, what allows Sheridan to do her job as a stopper is the knowledge that all of her teammates are going to do their jobs alongside her.

"I see what everyone else brings and my defense is where I stand at as far as helping this team most of the time," Sheridan said. "Everyone else shoots wonderfully, Maggie Grant is a great shooter and so is Grace (O'Neill) so at practice, I want to play defense as well as I can against them so they can shoot it as well as they can in games."

She also isn't afraid to push back a bit. In Thursday's match-up with the relentless Casey, Sheridan knew she couldn't let the high-scoring LC junior get where she wanted without some resistance and tested the limits of what the officials would let go to keep Casey from moving unimpeded around the court.

It's all tricks of the trade she's picked up in practices matching up against O'Neill or Grant or either Taylor or Brooke Wilson and from watching film of upcoming opponents to see what those players she'll guard don't react well to.

"(Casey) is an amazing player, I've seen all her stats and I've watched her play on film and everything but I think with some people, you can frustrate them by being physical back," Sheridan said. "You can push on them and sometimes  it gets in people's heads and I think that was a big thing today, along with just denying and making sure she doesn't get the ball."

Brooke Wilson picked up a couple early fouls, leaving the bulk of the Casey defense to Sheridan on Thursday. Even coming out of halftime, Wilson started on LC's leading scorer but after picking up her third foul early on, the Patriots switched the matchup right back to Sheridan.

By the end of the game, Sherdian and the Patriots had limited Casey to 10 points, well below her season average, and just as importantly, held her to just nine total shot attempts.

"My quickness sometimes helps but at the end of it, it's all our team defense," Sheridan said. "I know if I'm beat, someone is going to be there. I have trust they'll be there for me when I do get beat."

Sheridan is also a field hockey player - along with O'Neill and Courtland Schumacher - where she fills a somewhat similar role of whatever the team needs in a given game. Sometimes, she's a center mid, others a center forward, she may fill in on a wing or even in the back and the junior laughed a bit trying to shoehorn exactly what position she plays in the fall.

There definitely is a carryover in an area most players would otherwise dread.

"All that conditioning from running up and down, I definitely feel like that's the thing I'm best at - running," Sheridan said. "That definitely correlates to this. Just run around, that's what I do, and it's great."

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ARCHBISHOP CARROLL 62, LANSDALE CATHOLIC 29

Taylor Wilson won the opening jump ball, then scored the opening basket off an assist by her sister Brooke.

She wouldn't slow down from there until she was pulled from the game in the final quarter with the Patriots holding a huge lead. The junior wing scored her team's first 10 points, had a hand in Carroll's first 15, ended the first half with a buzzer-beater off a broken play and put in 11 more points in the third quarter.

All in all, not a bad night.

She may not have seen it all coming her way, but Wilson definitely saw good things coming for her team with a 10-0 PCL record at stake.

"How we warm up is how we're going to play in the first quarter, we had a great warm-up and it really set the momentum that we were 9-0 and we wanted to be undefeated," Wilson said. "We wanted to win every single game in the league, so that energy is what pushed us."

During the summer and fall, a lot of eyes were on Archbishop Wood and Cardinal O'Hara as contenders for the PCL title but anyone in the know in and around the league not-so-subtly pointed to Carroll as a team to watch. Their comeback win over defending champion Wood and a clinical defensive effort against O'Hara in the regular season validated all that, but the Patriots already knew what they were about.

"I knew right when we started open gyms in June," Wilson said. "It showed as soon as we started working after the season last year, this group of girls is so dedicated. Our two seniors, they get us prepared and we all work so hard and to see that hard work all paying off, it's just so special."

The top seed for the eight-team PCL playoffs starting next week, Carroll knows it is now the team to beat. Everyone that lost to the Patriots, which was everyone, would love to be the team that keeps Carroll from getting to the Palestra

"We can't underestimate any team we play," Wilson said. "Any team could come out and do what we did tonight.

"I mean, it's the Catholic League. You don't know what to expect."

By Quarter
Archbishop Carroll:  17  |  15  |  24  |   6   ||  62
Lansdale Catholic:    5   |   8   |   8   |   8   ||  29

Scorers
Carroll: Taylor Wilson 29, Brooke Wilson 9, Grace O'Neill 8, Machaela Henry 6, Courtland Schumacher 5, Maggie Grant 3, Chloe Bleckley 2

Lansdale: Gabby Casey 10, Saniyah Littlejohn 8, Cassidy Saulino 6, Nadia Yemola 2, Lauren Edwards 2, Olivia Boccella 1