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Neumann-Goretti's Vannicola shows importance in championship win

03/24/2017, 1:00am EDT
By Josh Verlin

Dante Vannicola (above) nearly left the Neumann-Goretti team before this season before the Saints' stars convinced him to stay. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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HERSHEY, Pa. -- Dante Vannicola had one bucket in Neumann-Goretti’s Class 3A Championship win over Lincoln Park on Thursday night.

It certainly wasn’t a crucial shot, coming in the final minutes of the Saints’ 89-58 blowout victory, their seventh state championship in the last eight years. It wasn’t the most impressive, either -- that honor likely went to sophomore Christian Ings’ rim-rocking slam earlier in the final period, or perhaps senior forward Dhamir Cosby-Roundtree’s Euro-step through several defenders en route to a layup back in the third quarter.

But when Vannicola received a pass from junior guard Dymir Montague and popped it off the glass for an easy layup, the Neumann-Goretti bench lost its mind.

And in doing so, they showed the value of the 6-foot-3 senior guard to the most successful program in the state.

“If you can’t tell, he’s the favorite guy on the team,” Neumann-Goretti coach Carl Arrigale said. “Everybody loves him. They would have been killing me if I didn’t get him in.”

Before the season Vannicola found out himself just what he means to the rest of the Saints, when he considered ending his basketball career entirely.

As a deep reserve for a team that regularly boasts numerous Division I prospects, Vannicola knew he would almost never see the court over the likes of classmates Cosby-Roundtree or Quade Green, who will be playing college ball at Villanova and Kentucky, respectively, or any one of Arrigale’s other talented cadre of youngsters. Spending one’s entire senior season on the bench is a hard pill to swallow, and Vannicola wasn’t sure he was up for the role.

But instead, it was those same two high-major prospects who sat Vannicola down and set the record straight: he was part of the team. Period.

“He wasn’t really playing, he wasn’t trying to do anything but we convinced him to play, come work out with us,” Green said. “He lost his love for the game, so we just brought him back -- it’s a family.”

“It’s weird, I never thought they thought that until they really confronted me about it,” Vannicola said. “And it really meant more than just basketball.”

So as Green and Cosby-Roundtree helped lead Neumann-Goretti to 25 wins, a berth in the Catholic League championship game for the ninth straight season and yet another run through the PIAA championship, Vannicola played his part, supporting his teammates from the bench and working just as hard as them in practice.

On the season, he scored a grand total of 22 points, the same number Green finished with in the final game of his stellar Saints career. But that certainly didn’t matter in the slightest to his teammates and classmates, who made sure he was as much in the middle of the celebrations as anybody else.

“They really love him, they really like him being around,” Arrigale said. “They have a good time together these guys, in the locker room, playing cards and goofing around and stuff like that, and he’s right in the middle of it all. He’s an important part of what we do, you need guys like that.”

Thanks to his teammates’ building up a 23-point lead at halftime and expanding it to 34 entering the fourth, Vannicola knew he’d get some significant playing time -- and he did, entering with 4:59 left and playing out the remainder of the contest.

As soon as he entered the game, he had his mind on one thing.

“I saw a bucket,” he admitted. “(My teammates) just looked at me, all they wanted for me was to score and get on the scoreboard.”

When he finally did get his layup, with 2:45 remaining, there was nothing else left to accomplish in Hershey save for accepting the state championship trophy afterwards.

Vannicola’s layup will be the last of his basketball career, at least in an organized sense. He turned down an opportunity to play at Penn State-Hazleton, opting instead to begin his professional career as a plumber right away.

There’s certainly no knock against going out on top.

“I never really wanted it to end,” Vannicola said. “It was always fun, I was really going to go play basketball in college, but I just thought it was better for me to go work, go get my life started.

“No better way to end it,” he added.


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