City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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This past Sunday, when Coatesville head coach Chuck Moore attended Triumph Baptist Church, his pastor fed him with some interesting thoughts.

“I can and I will” was the phrase that came from Moore’s minister, during his message to the church body.  

Those five words not only resonated with Moore, but also his players, when they heard the same statement come from their coach’s mouth 24 hours later, prior to the Ches-Mont league championship game Monday night against rival Downingtown West.

“I’m a church-going man, and my pastor put that to me when I went to church the other day,” Moore remarked. “Those are the things that you’ve got to speak out and put into practice, and those were things we preached before the game.”

Coatesville knew they “could.” They had done it before, taking down the Whippets just six days prior in a 47-42 thriller. 

West, of course, had proven that they also “could,” having snatched a 49-39 victory in Coatesville's gymnasium back on January 7.

With that in mind, the general consensus leading up to tip-off was, essentially, “both teams can, but only one team will.”

That one team was Coatesville.

Moore’s Red Raiders took his words to heart and played a hard-fought, valiant thirty-two minutes, from which they emerged victorious, knocking off the defending league champions by a final tally of 38-37 to win their first conference title during Moore’s tenure.

“All the doubt people had, I’m just glad we came out over top of everything, and just came out and played a good game,” said senior leader Rome Boyer. “Downingtown West is a great team, we take nothing away from them, hopefully we’ll see them again, it’s always a good time when we play them, our rivals.”

“It’s about (my players), for everything they’ve been through,” Moore added. “They’re battle-tested, they’re hungry, they wanted to be here and deserved to be here, and they just had the will to win.”

The theme of Downingtown West-Coatesville match-ups this season has been exciting, scrappy, low-scoring basketball. In both regular season meetings, the team who scored first went on to be victorious.

Ironically, while West scored the first point--a singular Ryan Betley free throw--it was the Red Raiders who scored the first field goal, and from there never trailed, just as each winning team had done in the previous two showdowns.

From there it was the usual defensive struggle. The Whippets’ limited scoring came almost entirely from their three seniors; Betley had 12 while Josh Warren and Dom Guerrera each had 10.

The Red Raider’s scoring was much more balanced. With not one player in double digits, Coatesville had six different scorers. Most notably, Boyer had nine of his team’s points, while seniors Justus Martinez and Jordan Young scored seven each.

Young in particular was critical in the end of the game; the senior who knocked down a free throw to force overtime in his team’s semifinal against Great Valley had a key foul shot to put his team up by three in the final seconds and ultimately seal the victory.

“It was a situation I’d been in before,” Young said. “Last game against Great Valley, I had to make the free throw to go into overtime so I felt like I’ve been in that situation a couple of times this year and just had to clear my mind. I knew the game was on the line and I could seal the game and end it, so I just wanted to clear my mind and do what I know I can do.”

His free throws came after snatching one of his eight rebounds--he and the 6-foot-6 Martinez combined for eighteen boards up against the stout glass presence of Warren, a 6-8 center.

“I think that was huge for us, we kept them off the offensive glass and kept the game at our pace by not giving them any offensive rebounds and letting them have second-chance points,” Young added.

While the glass was a point of struggle for the Whippets, a bigger issue was the fact that Betley, a Penn-commit with a dagger three-point shot, failed to convert on any of his five long-distance attempts. Most of those attempts, however, were under the duress of active defense from Red Raiders like Dalton Donovan and Kamau Brickus.

“Some games they just don’t go down, tonight was just one of those games where they didn’t go down for us,” Ritter said of his sharpshooting senior. “That’s a lot to do with Coatesville’s defense on him, they played great ‘D’ and kind of wore him down, but at the same time he’s going to make many more shots for us this year.”

Obviously, the road doesn’t end here for either of these teams. Coatesville, the no. 1 seed in District 1 AAAA playoffs has a game this Friday with Bensalem, while the third-seeded Whippets will play host to Garnet Valley.

The Whippets now have to spend the next few weeks with this bitter taste in their mouths. Ritter already has his guys looking forward to the one way they can fix that problem.

“Our message was that the feeling we have right now, the only thing that’s going to replace it is a district title,” he said. “We can’t cut today’s nets down so we’ve got to cut one down at Temple, that’s the only thing that’s going to make us feel better. We’ll be ready to go starting Friday night.”

As for Coatesville, the road ahead may take some preparation and mental toughness, but at least for tonight, they can take a page out of Rome Boyer’s book.

“There’s no expression for how this feels. I just can’t wait to go home, spend the night with my family,” said Boyer. “We’ll be back in the lab tomorrow and get ready for Friday.”