City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
--

When Archbishop Carroll senior Josh Sharkey needs some extra motivation, he watches it.

“It” being last year’s PIAA Class AAA championship, which had the Patriots matched up with Catholic League rivals Neumann-Goretti.

The motivation comes from the Saints’ 69-67 win in March, the fifth time in six years that Neumann-Goretti took home the Class AAA title--and the 13th time in a row they’d won a head-to-head matchup over the Patriots.

"I see failure,” Sharkey said. “We didn't get it done. They beat us on a buzzer-beater the first time we saw them, and then they beat us in the state championship.”

Carroll’s chance for revenge comes on Friday night, in a game that’s been moved up to 5 PM thanks to the impending winter storm scheduled to strike later that evening. And, while as Neumann-Goretti head coach Carl Arrigale noted, “whoever doesn’t win tomorrow, it’s not the end of the world,” there’s still a potential Catholic League regular-season championship on the way for the victor.

The Patriots (15-1, 7-0 PCL) and Saints (14-2, 7-0 PCL) are the only two teams left in the 14-team league without a loss in conference play after Carroll took out the only other team to make it to 6-0, St. Joseph’s Prep, on Monday.

The premier game in the Catholic League before the season seemed to be the Neumann-Roman matchup, with the Saints’ talented starting five matched up with the Penn State-bound trio that makes up the nucleus of the Cahillites. But Roman, which lost that game by 17 on Jan. 6, lost to Carroll 61-54 four days later to fall into a two-loss group that also includes Conwell-Egan and La Salle HS.

So it’s the surprise Patriots, who graduated two high-major players and lost a third to transfer from last year, who have emerged as the primary challenger to Neumann’s regular-season championship this season.

"I don't think many people outside of our team thought it was possible,” said Carroll senior Ryan Daly, a 6-4 shooting guard bound for Hartford. “I think most people thought Roman was going to run through the league...I definitely thought it was possible for us, because I knew we had a good team. And now I think others are starting to warm up to the idea that we're pretty good."

Arrigale was less surprised, given the experience the Patriots have in the backcourt.

Daly (21.8 ppg) and Sharkey (14 ppg) are both having tremendous senior seasons, with a strong supporting cast that includes 6-4 senior wing John Rigsby (11.5 ppg), 6-8 senior forward Miks Antoms (5.1 ppg) and 6-3 junior guard Colin Daly, Ryan’s younger brother and a 3-point threat (6.1 ppg).

No more Derrick Jones, the UNLV freshman who had 30 points and 18 rebounds in that Catholic League championship game? No problem.

“They lost a lot of the guys that you guys like to talk about, the guys that run fast and jump high,” Arrigale said, “but they’ve got a lot of quality kids left. There’s a lot of times where they have four seniors on the court, and that’s invaluable, having that kind of experience out there.”

Neumann-Goretti is in the midst of a grueling January of its own, with 14 games over the month’s 31 days; this will be No. 11 in that stretch.

But they’ve handled themselves confidently with nine wins in a row, led by muscular 6-3 senior guard Zane Martin, a Towson commit, at 16.9 ppg; two high-major Division I junior prospects, 6-0 guard Quade Green (16.8 ppg) and athletic 6-8 forward Dhamir Cosby-Roundtree (14.6 ppg), follow. Also playing well are two more senior guards, 3-point specialist Vaughn Covington (7.9 ppg) and 6-1 combo Rasheed Browne (11.1 ppg), who netted his first two Division I offers last week from Florida Gulf Coast and Morgan State.

That’s no big deal for a program that ran off a 73-game winning streak in league play a few years back, and has become a factory for churning out high-major talent.

“You got to go through the champs,” Carroll skipper Paul Romanczuk said. “They've won six of the last seven Catholic League titles for a reason, they've won countless state titles for a reason. They're clicking on all cylinders and playing really good basketball. I think we're playing good basketball, too, so it should be a fun one on Friday night."

The last time Sharkey, a 5-10 point guard bound for Samford, watched the 2015 championship was earlier in the week, even before the Prep game.

“It was to see what they did to beat us,” he said, “and to see the little things we didn't do."

Soon enough, he’ll find out if the extra studying paid off.

~~~

NOTE: No tickets will be sold at the door; only in advance at Neumann-Goretti.