City of Basketball Love

By Joseph Santoliquito (JSantoliquito)
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WEST CHESTER — The West Chester men’s basketball team could collectively sense something was up on Wednesday during their afternoon shootaround.

Rams’ sophomore 6-2 guard Elijah Allen (Dover, Del./Dover) was playing a buzzer-beater game, jacking up halfcourt shots that were falling. Sophomore 6-1 guard Robert Smith (Philadelphia, Pa./Bishop McDevitt) was experimenting with unusual twisting moves around the basket—and those shots were falling, too.

West Chester was just coming off a PSAC East loss to Shippensburg on Monday, when the Rams shot 37% and were getting ready to host East Stroudsburg Wednesday night. Allen made a 3 of 34 shots combined in his previous three games.

He made more than three shots in the first half against the visiting Warriors. In fact, it seemed, everyone wearing West Chester home white was making shots, as the Rams scored a season-high 106 points, a record for most points a West Chester team ever scored against East Stroudsburg in the Rams’ thoroughly entertaining 106-98 victory.

Allen finished with a career-high 29 on 10-of-17 shooting, while Allen scored a season-high 27 in moving the Rams to 17-7 overall and 12-6 in the PSAC East, jumping to third place in the conference. The victory also marked the first time the Rams completed a season sweep of East Stroudsburg (18-6, 12-6) since the 2008-09 season.

“I had that feeling this was going to be a good day today,” Allen said. “Every day I come out thinking that I’m going to hit some shots, and once a few go in, that rim gets bigger and bigger. We were playing a halfcourt buzzer-beater game, and I took this shot and made it.

“I got more confident each shot that went in. I think we all this game this afternoon.”

Rams’ coach Damien Blair knew what to expect from East Stroudsburg, as Warriors’ coach Jeff Wilson did about West Chester. What was unavoidable was the second and sometimes third chances the Rams got off missed shots, outrebounding the Warriors, 50-39.

It also helps when you’re shooting 56%, which West Chester did for a good portion of the second half, before settling for 50% (38 of 75) and 42.3% from beyond the arc.

“To be honest, what we did tonight was not the guard, believe it or not, it was the post players,” Blair said. “If you look at any really good team, East Stroudsburg is a very good, because they have two really good post players (Carlos Pepin and Mastery Charter’s Lakeem McAliley). We lost some guys to injuries and whatever we have going on, so we needed some consistency in that spot. We’re short-handed in that area.

“But if we can bottle that piece, when we play really well, defend, rebound, finish around the basket and our guards are hitting shots, there’s not telling what they can do. I didn’t think we would score 106 points, but we beat them at their place, when our guards didn’t play well, and we still scored 86 points.”

The Rams’ Kyle McGee dropped a triple-double (11-point, 11 assist, and 10 rebounds) and 6-6 senior forward Eli Barrett hauled down 9 rebounds.

It was a PSAC game that broke out into an NBA game. Wilson kept at his players, constantly repeating, “We need a stop, we need a stop.”

“They played very well, and I’m not sure we got off the bus, it’s a bad combination,” Wilson said. “To be honest, we didn’t play with any intensity. We didn’t play with any aggressiveness. We played a very poor basketball game, especially at the defensive end.

“All credit to West Chester, they took advantage of every one of our lapses. We scored enough to win, but no good team can win if you don’t play at both ends of the floor. Their guards are very good, with McGee, Smith and Allen. They let their guards get downhill and their guard play is very, very good. We knew Allen shoots them deep.”

McAliley was a beast. He had a homecoming of sorts, and he was unstoppable, finishing with 21 points on 8 of 13 shooting.

“We knew West Chester had depth and they had good guards and good bigs, and that was completely, we should have played better than we did,” said McAliley, who fouled out with :43 left to play who is scheduled to graduate with a degree in public health and still has two years of eligibility. “Coach Wilson was mad, and I was mad, too, because we didn’t put out that extra one percent. They basically out-toughed and out-worked us, and that’s not our brand.

“It’s a team effort, a team game.”  

West Chester’s previous high output against East Stroudsburg was 101 points during the 2017-18 season.

“We’re coming together at the right time,” Smith said. “I practice the kinds of shots I was making tonight. I was doing that this afternoon, driving and we knew this was a big game. We want to punch ourselves a ticket to the NCAAs and that winning mentality is something we have to take from tonight. Just hoopin.”

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here.