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P-W Spring League Notebook: Thurs., June 1

06/01/2017, 11:15pm EDT
By Josh Verlin & Riley Thompson

Pennsbury's Raylil WInton (above) scored 18 points in a losing effort on Thursday night. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin) &
Riley Thompson (@RiThompson3)

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The Plymouth-Whitemarsh Spring Basketball League continued into its third week of action on Thursday night, with all six teams in action as usual over three games at Colonial Elementary School.

Here’s a notebook from the evening:

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Pennsbury’s new crew takes learning lesson in loss

With an entirely new cast of characters, it’s going to be a summer of learning for Pennsbury, which has to replace a group of 10 seniors that included its entire starting lineup from this past year.

Thursday night proved the Falcons still have a ways to go, as they squandered a 16-point lead in the fourth quarter to La Salle College HS to wind up on the wrong side of a 48-45 score.

It was a game that Pennsbury led until the final minutes, when La Salle’s Zach Crisler (16 points) and Sean Simon (14 points) took over to lift the Explorers to the close win.

“I really think that we just got nervous at the end,” guard Raylil Winton said about the close loss, in which inexperience and a lack of chemistry played their parts down the stretch. “We had a lot of players that were just...freshmen, JV, not really playing a lot so they were getting a little nervous.”

However, Pennsbury’s impressive performance in the first three quarters cannot be overlooked.

Against a La Salle attack that features two juniors with Division I offers and at least two other scholarship-level players in the starting lineup, the Falcons held the Explorers to 26 points through the first three quarters. That was helped out by strong efforts on the glass from rising senior Chad Weldon (6-8) and rising junior Gary Francis (6-4), who also scored a combined 19 points in the win.

“Our defense is the best we [have],” Winton said. “We played really tight defense, a lot of energy.”

Pennsbury is looking to find a new identity heading into next season after losing its entire starting lineup that served as the core of the team from their 2016-2017 season, in which the Falcons finished 16-10 (8-4 SOL).  

A huge part of that senior class was forwards Mark Flagg (6-8) and Billy Warren (6-6), two all-league caliber big guys who anchored Pennsbury down low. Flagg will playing his college basketball at D-I St. Francis (Pa.), while Warren is still undecided for next year.

Winton, a rising senior guard, is one of just two returning rotation players from a Pennsbury team that earned the No. 6 seed in the District 1 6A playoffs last season.

The 5-foot-9 guard is in line to be one of the leaders on a young team next season, and Thursday night he showed he can be just that, scoring 18 in the loss. He had it going early on, scoring nine in the opening frame and 14 in the first half while scoring in a variety of ways. Winton was able to score from long distance and off the bounce with an impressive pull-up jumper.

“I just kept feeling it,” Winston said about his impressive offensive performance. “My team allowed me to keep shooting, and I just kept pulling up.”

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Quick Hits

-- Lower Merion rising junior wing Jack Forrest ended the night with a bang, capping off the third and final game with a game-winning, buzzer-beating 3-pointer from just right of straightaway to lift the Aces to a 54-52 win over Archbishop Ryan. LM trailed for the majority of the game, falling behind by double-digits in the second quarter, and Ryan held a lead of around a dozen points into the early parts of the fourth quarter. But Lower Merion rising senior Harrison Kleven got the Aces back into it with a quartet of second-half 3-pointers, and Forrest finished it off to end up with a game-high 21 points. Also playing well for Lower Merion was rising junior Theo Henry, who had eight of his 14 points in the first quarter.

-- With talent forwards Matiss Kulackovskis (Bowling Green) and Fred Taylor (West Chester) off to college, Archbishop Ryan head coach Joe Zeglinski has a large group of guards to work with to prepare for the 2017-18 season. This particular night, it was rising junior wing Colin Reed who stood out with a 12-point effort, including a pair of 3-pointers in the fourth quarter as the Raiders battled the Aces down the stretch. Also playing well for Ryan was rising senior Anthony Woodward, who played tough ‘D’ and also chipped in 10 points, plus Amin Bryant, the super-athletic junior guard who’s going to have the ball in his hands a lot this year.

-- Host Plymouth-Whitemarsh ran past Penn Wood thanks to its pressure defense, which helped the Colonials open up a 17-5 lead after one quarter, though the teams played even through the next two; it was 33-22 P-W heading into the fourth. It was largely an ugly night offensively for Jim Donofrio’s bunch, who took a lot more shots than they made, but there was one Colonial who managed to hit a few: rising junior Kyree Pendleton, an intriguing 6-2 off guard who came in in the fourth quarter and scored 10 points in about four minutes of action.

-- Though he didn’t play much last year behind the group of senior forwards mentioned above, Pennsbury’s Chad Weldon looks like he’s ready to be the man in the middle for the Falcons this year. The 6-8, 210-pound big man held his own against the talented Crisler, finishing with eight points and 12 rebounds for Pennsbury, doing a great job of fighting for second-and-third effort boards on both ends, and also showed he wasn’t afraid to go up and challenge a shot when he was in position. Already a high-level Division III prospect, Weldon has a chance to approach scholarship territory with a strong summer and senior year.


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