City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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RADNOR — They were a team full of stars a year ago that grinded. This year, the Radnor Raptors are a team full of grinders that grind. There is nothing flashy about them. There is no one dominant player that is athletically superior.

They are a dribbling, defending, floor-diving, sum-is-better-than-the-parts team.

Radnor boys basketball, which entered Thursday night’s Central League play the No. 3 team in PIAA District 1 Class 5A play, avenged an earlier-season loss to pesky, disciplined Penncrest 43-30 behind the team-high 13 points each from Kessy Cox and Elijah Sellers.

The Raptors (12-3, 8-4) still carry that mantle of the defending District 1 Class 5A champions. They have carried the weight of that well, as emphasized by the word on the back of the warm-up shooting shirts: “Proof.”

New coach Tim Smallwood has not thrown a lot at this group. He has kept simple mantra: “Compete.”

Right now, Smallwood said, his team is where he wants it, though he sees it arcing upward as February approaches.

“What we saw tonight we have seen all year, our guys are tough and don’t get down on themselves,” Smallwood said. “They don’t get too high, or too low. They are able to overcome adversity and know they are always in the game. We have lacrosse players all over the place on this team, and I have to give credit to that program, because they are three-time defending state champions and they are winners.”

That attitude has spilled onto the court in players like Cox, who is in his last year of organized basketball before going a few blocks away to play in the fall for Villanova’s national-caliber lacrosse team.

“We had to hit the reset button,” he said. “Penncrest is a tough team to play against. When we played them earlier in the year, we thought we were going to win and were thrown off by their pace and lost. Tonight, I think this was a huge win. We made a lot of growth from that game to this game.”

Cox and Sellers said the collective team attitude need an overhaul.

“We had to start playing more together,” said Sellers, who received scant minutes coming off the bench last year. “We play hard defense and force teams to score points. This win felt good. We understand each other better than we did a month ago. Everyone knows their role, and we are a lot more unselfish. We have a lot more confidence with each other.”

For three quarters, it was a competitive game. Scoring came at a premium. Four was the largest margin that separated either team through the first 24 minutes. Radnor was the first team to break 30 early in the fourth quarter.

Radnor's Elijah Sellers scored 13 points against Penncrest. (Photo: Mark Jordan/CoBL)

Then, the Raptors opened it up. Penncrest (12-6, 6-6) went 5 minutes, 38 seconds between bookend Mikey Mita baskets from late in the third quarter until there was 3:35 left to play.

By then, Radnor had opened a 37-30, which by the way each team was scoring, was a big lead.

The Raptors closed by outscoring Penncrest 14-2 in the final quarter, forcing five turnovers and doubling Mita, the Lions’ leading scorer, every chance they could.

A Michael Savadove hoop, followed by a steal-and-score from Savadove the next Penncrest trip down, gave the Raptors a 37-28 edge. Sellers and Cox put the finishing touches on it with consecutive baskets, and Radnor played keep-away on offense the bulk of the remaining 2:07 to seal the victory.

“Radnor is just a physical and the toughest team we’ve faced, and they went into a double-team, trapping defense and just got after it,” Penncrest’s legendary coach Mike Doyle said. “We went toe-to-toe with the district’s No. 3 team in their building, but in the last eight minutes it just wore in us and we just worn down.”

By Quarter

Penncrest: 7 | 9 | 12 | 2 || 30

Radnor: 7 | 5 | 17 | 14 || 43

Scoring

Penncrest: Mikey Mita 14, Pat Garrison 5, Will Stanton 4, Connor Cahill 3, Kevin Gamlin 3, Michael Maddox 1.

Radnor: Kessy Cox 13, Elijah Sellers 13, Michael Savadove 7, Sawyer Smith 4, Henry Pierce 4, Harrison Ceppa 2.

Joseph Santoliquito is a hall of fame, 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.