Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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YEADON — At first, no one took it seriously. The strobe lights were flashing and the fire alarms sounded Tuesday night during halftime at Penn Wood, which was hosting Chester in a Del-Val League game.
Allegedly, someone was vaping in a bathroom, triggering the major inconvenience, and everyone had to be evacuated out of the gym into the chilly night while waiting for the fire department to arrive and turn off the alarm.
None of that seemed to deter Chester freshman Ramee Davis Jr. The Clippers and Penn Wood had to wait on the football field in the back of the school before the all clear was given to repopulate the building.
Ramee Davis Jr.'s big fourth quarter spelled the difference in Chester's win at Penn Wood (Photo by Joseph Santoliquito/CoBL).
Davis needed a quarter to regain his touch, but once it came, the Clippers’ 6-foot-2 freshman guard scored eight of his game-high 15 points in the fourth quarter to spell the difference in a Chester 54-46 victory.
The Clippers are now 15-7 overall and remain undefeated in the Del-Val with a perfect 8-0 mark, while Penn Wood hangs perilously close to not making the PIAA District 1 Class 6A playoffs for a second-straight year, falling to 8-11 and 4-3 in the league.
The Clippers were dealt a severe blow a few weeks ago when junior twins Jalen and Daron Harris, Division I football talents, decided to leave the team and throw their focus into offseason football training.
This forced Clippers coach Keith Taylor to reshuffle his lineup, tinker with new rotations, look for new scoring sources and interior defenders, considering how small Chester is. He may have found an answer in Davis, whose father played for Chester and would bring his son as a baby to Clipper games.
A pair of Davis’ free throws tied the game at 41-41 with 4:13 left to play, and he went 4-for-4 from the line in the last 23 seconds to seal the victory.
For a freshman, he showed considerable poise, dealing with the pressure of a hostile, annoyed crowd (mostly from standing in the cold for about 30 minutes), and the pressure of dealing with a desperate Penn Wood team, playing for its postseason survival.
“Free throws are the easiest shot in the game,” said Davis, who has a sweet touch. “I’m trying to get more of a feel of the game, and get more assertive. There was some trash talking going on with the sideline, and that put a little chip on my shoulders. The fire alarm didn’t affect me at all. It’s a great feeling being a legacy on this team, and with the twins going, I’m getting more time and being asked to do more things, like crash the boards.”
When the game mattered most, Taylor had two freshmen on the court, Davis and Zhir Clayton. They may be freshmen, but Taylor does not look at them as freshmen anymore.
“We’re using a next-man-up mentality with the twins leaving, and if you’re playing well, you’re going to stay in the game, and if you’re not, we’ll find someone else to put in there for the moment,” Taylor said. “Today may not be your day, it may be another day. So, we are mixing and matching. This is what we had before the twins came back.
“We lost a lot of aggressiveness and leadership with the twins. But we are putting the young guys up front, and they have been playing well. We’re going to need them in the (PIAA District 1 Class 6A) playoffs. This is nothing new for the young kids. They have been in a hostile environment since they were playing in the Chester Biddy League.”
Taylor has no problem expecting his freshmen to play like upperclassmen. Davis has always been a star, taller than the rest of the kids his age, and carrying a Chester legacy along with it.
“They will get no breaks. There is a lot of pressure on those cats (Davis and Clayton) and I do expect them to step up, come in and take care of the ball and do well,” Taylor said. “I will say though I have never dealt with a fire alarm in the middle of a game before, but I told my guys to stay focused.”
As of Tuesday night, Penn Wood was ranked No. 28 in District 1 Class 6A, four places out of the District 1 Class 6A playoffs with two games to play.
“When you do this a long time, you experience a lot of crazy stuff, but the fire alarm did not really affect anything,” Penn Wood coach Matt Lindeman said. “This turned into a three-minute game down in the end, and we didn’t make enough good plays. When we were getting pressed, we weren’t aggressive enough to break their pressure. This is going to be close, with two games left. We’ll need help. We’re going out to control what we need to control and win two games, then see what happens.”
Penn Wood received a nice little jolt itself from freshman guard Bellvin Smith, who dropped in a team-high 10 points.
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By Quarter
Chester (15-7, 8-0 Del-Val League): 9 | 14 | 10 | 20 || 54
Penn Wood (8-11, 4-3 Del-Val League): 9 | 11 | 14 | 12 || 46
Scoring
Chester: Ramee Davis Jr. 15, Dallas Thompson 11, Zhir Clayton 8, Rashad Dorsey 8, Nymeer Madison 7, Paul Lindsay II 5.
Penn Wood: Bellvin Smith 10, Taj Cobbs 8, Malik Edwards 8, Maurion Miller 5, Jehki Estrada 4, Amaury Womack 3, Zahsheen Levins 3, Nafi Davis 2, Stan Jones 2, Haji Ali 1.
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 BlueSky here.
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