City of Basketball Love

Sean McBryan (@SeanMcBryan)
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It was an accomplishment for Archbishop Carroll to even be playing for a state championship so early in the young Patriots’ careers.

The rotation of sophomores and freshmen went on a spirited run, winning five games in a row after a Catholic League loss to Neumann-Goretti to put themselves in the PIAA Class 4A title game Thursday night against defending champ Lincoln Park at Hershey’s Giant Center.

That’s where Carroll’s run came to an end by the doing of Pitt commit and senior Brandin Cummings’ 37 points and five-star junior recruit Meleek Thomas’ 16 points and 14 rebounds as the Leopards pounced early, cruising to an 80-50 over the Patriots.

“Nobody expected us to be here,” said Carroll sophomore guard and captain Ian Williams, who had 12 points, four rebounds, and three assists. “Just being able to experience what it feels like. We’ll take the butt-whooping and we’ll be back next year.”

Overall the season was a resounding success for head coach Francis Bowe’s Patriots with a state championship appearance and the hope that the entire team can continue to build on that success in the foreseeable future. Barring any defections — always a possibility in a basketball landscape saturated with transfers — Bowe’s got his rotation set for the next two seasons.

The best-case scenario for Carroll is having Williams and fellow sophomores Luca Foster, Nasir Ralls, Drew Corrao, and Nate Rusike back for the next two seasons and freshmen Darrell Davis and Munir Greig back for three.

“I think this journey gives us a better chance of everybody coming back,” Bowe said of the Patriots run. “We live in a world of transfer portals from college to high school to prep programs. What will convince the team to want to come back to school and build a community? It’s games like this, events like this, and losses like this.

“That’s part of the maturation and education these kids received. Of course I wanted a victory, but I couldn’t be any prouder or happy for these guys because we did a lot this year.”

If the District 12 third-place Patriots (21-9) remain together, they’ll have the potential to win one or multiple state championships, but the WPIAL champion Leopards (28-3) were on another level Thursday in winning back-to-back state titles and their fourth overall.

“We never really looked at it as youth versus people that are older than us,” Williams said. “We still believe that we are good basketball players. I just feel like they had a better night than us. They didn’t really miss a shot in the first half, which we can’t control. It’s just about keeping our mental together and realizing it’s not going to go our way in every game. Tonight wasn’t our night.”

The game started out back-and-forth and Williams’ free throw with 5:11 left in the first quarter cut Lincoln Park’s lead to 9-7.

Cummings and Thomas — who has offers from UConn, Kentucky, Duke, Kansas, et al. — then caught fire to spark a 16-0 run that finally ended when Williams converted an and-one with less than a minute to go in the quarter.

Thomas had 11 first-quarter points and Cummings 10.

Lincoln Park senior Mikey Crawford, a Buffalo football commit, got involved in the second quarter scoring 11 points without missing a shot. Cummings drilled three 3’s in the stanza and the Leopards extended their lead to 51-22.

The Leopards shot 21-for-30 from the field in the first half while holding the Patriots to 8-for-29 shooting.

The teams played evenly in the second half, but Thomas’ bucket less than a minute into the third quarter enacted the running clock — which doesn’t stop once a team gets ahead by 30 — when the Leopards went up by 31.

Cummings scored 14 of the Leopards 16 points in the final quarter, including four 3’s. Overall, the senior shot 14-for-18 from the field and 7-for-8 from deep.

“Everything you hear about him is true,” Bowe said of Cummings. “They shot 21-for-30 in the first half and maybe even better in the second half. Maybe our kids will be playing like that when they’re seniors.”

By Quarter
Archbishop Carroll:  10  |  12 |  12  |  16  ||  50

Lincoln Park:   25   |  26  |  13  |  16  ||  80

Scoring
Archbishop Carroll: Williams 12, Foster 12, Greig 10, Ralls 7, Davis 4, Murawski 3, Corrao 2.

Lincoln Park: Cummings 37, Thomas 16, Crawford 15, Lum 6, Green 4, McGhee 2.