City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The opening two quarters of a District 1 5A semifinal between No. 4 seed Bishop Shanahan and No. 8 Upper Merion couldn’t have been much uglier.

With every young athlete playing on by far the biggest stage of his career, both teams came out ice cold, combining for a grand total of 21 points in the game’s opening 16 minutes.

“A combination of defense and nerves,” Upper Merion head coach Jason Quenzer called it, though he admitted it was “maybe a little bit more nerves.”

With the way both the Vikings and Eagles were shooting the ball, it was only a matter of time before one of the two put something together.

Finally, after 13 missed 3-pointers over the game’s first 29 minutes, Upper Merion’s Andrew Persaud connected. And then, 30 seconds later, he hit from deep again.

The senior guard’s pair of 3-pointers in the game’s closing minutes sealed the deal as the Vikings advanced to the district championship game with a 45-30 win over the Eagles.

After an up-and-down regular season, Upper Merion finds itself now one win away from its first district championship since 1993. At the time, Quenzer was all of six years old.

The Vikings will face No. 3 Penncrest at Villanova University on Saturday (2 PM) in the first-ever district 5A final; the bracket is comprised mainly of teams who used to be in the old AAAA classification, with a few former AAA schools thrown in as well.

“We’re getting used to the 5A thing...it’s so different this year than it was last year,” Quenzer said. “But there’s really good teams in this tournament and we’re happy we’re in this position, these guys worked forever to be here and I’m just really proud of them.”

Upper Merion held a 20-19 lead through three quarters, which already seemed like an offensive bonanza after it was an 11-10 game in Shanahan’s advantage at halftime; the teams combined to hit a total of six shots in the first half.

Though senior forward Ethan Miller (team-high 15 points) kept Upper Merion in it with an eight-point third quarter, Vikings point guard Aiden Newell was the one who finally gave his team the boost it needed to put the game away.

The 5-foot-9 senior with an unchanging, stone-faced expression got the Upper Merion students roaring with a 3-point play to make it 25-21 with 6:42 left, and that opened the floodgates. Suddenly it was a nine-point game with 3:11 remaining after Persaud and Newell scored back-to-back layups, and Shanahan was on its heels.

“Pushing the ball definitely got us going in the fourth,” Newell said. “We weren’t hitting any shots so getting to the lane got us rolling.”

That’s when Persaud decided it was time to let loose on a right-wing 3-pointer, after his team had missed on more than a dozen prior attempts.

Nothing but net.

“I was just staying confident, knowing that my time would come,” he said.

The second one, which followed 30 seconds later, was the final nail in the coffin.

“I just play confident, I know my ability and I know I can hit big shots if I get the ball,” he said. “My teammates set me up and I hit what I had to hit."

Newell finished with a dozen points, joining Miller in double figures. Persaud scored eight, all coming in the fourth quarter.

Vikings star Matt Faw had a tough night offensively with eight points on 4-of-16 shooting.

But the 6-foot-8 forward headed to Holy Cross found other ways to chip in, coming up with a trio of big-time blocks and assisting on both of Persaud’s game-clinching triples in addition to grabbing 10 rebounds.

“If I’m not hitting my shots, I’m getting other people involved,” Faw said. “Andrew has been hitting those shots his whole life, his whole career; I’ve been playing with him since seventh grade and that’s what he does, he hits big, clutch shots. And when you can do that in a tight game like this, where every point is so meaningful, it’s just great.”

Faw missed six weeks in the middle of the season, a big reason the Vikings (16-9) lost nine of 15 games from Dec. 27 to Feb. 2. But with the D-I forward back in the mix, they’re looking much more like the team that was expected to compete for the 5A championship in the preseason.

“We battled a lot of adversity this year, having to play without him, because he’s obviously a tremendous talent,” Persaud said. “But I think that experience helped us because it helped give other players confidence, so now down the road that’s paying off.”

Shanahan junior point guard David Angelo knocked down two 3-pointers in the final two minutes to push him to a team-high 11 points.

The Eagles (19-8), who shot 9-of-45 (20 percent) from the floor and just 3-of-22 (13.6 percent) from 3-point range, will face No. 2 Great Valley in a seeding game on Friday night.