City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)

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RADNOR — The constant dribbling on the laminated living room wood floor would drive her mother up a wall. It was a little too loud. So, Natalia Kasmer would retreat to pound the ball on the basement den carpet for hours on end. The sound did not quite rattle the house. Everywhere Kasmer would go, she almost always had a ball tethered to her hand.

The minute Lower Merion freshman guard says it is inescapable; basketball is in the blood. Her older cousin Carson Kasmer is a senior star on the Aces’ boys’ team. Her father, Greg, is the younger brother of Carson’s dad, Gary, and her grandfather, Gary, was a guard for Temple’s legendary Harry Litwack in the early 1960s.

So, when you see the smiling Natalia, it makes sense. The way she sees the game beyond her age, the poise in which she handles the ball, especially under pressure, and the great trust her older teammates seem to have in her.

It was Natalia who broke open what had been a close Central League playoff game at Radnor Thursday night with an early fourth-quarter bucket and a great look inside for an assist that led to another crucial basket in the Aces’ 37-28 victory.

Lower Merion improves to 14-9, and will now face Central League regular-season champ Garnet Valley, which beat the Aces twice this season, Friday night at Garnet Valley, while Radnor fell to 15-8 and look like its secured the No. 2 seed in the PIAA District 1 Class 5A. The Raptors entered Thursday night’s contest seeded No. 2 in the Class 5A behind Gwynedd Mercy, while Lower Merion was ranked No. 20 in Class 6A; playoff games do not affect District 1 seeding.

Aces’ coach Erin Laney had the unenviable task of trying to beat Radnor twice. Both games seemed to follow the same pattern. Radnor got off to a slow start, rebounded to make it close, only to have Lower Merion stave off the Raptors in the end.

This has been a nice rebound season for the Aces. They finished 10-12 overall last year and have already exceeded that win total this season with the district playoffs still ahead.

Beating a team twice though, at any level, in any sport, is always a struggle.

“It’s always good competition with Radnor,” Laney said. “They’re great athletes. They play good defense. They make us have to switch up our offenses to look at our second and third situations within our sets, but this was a really nice game overall.

“Our freshman class has really helped us. When I took this job six years ago, I knew it would be a generation of kids that would turn this around. I knew this freshman class could be special. Natalia is so solid. She does not play like a freshman. She is confident for all 32 minutes, and has not really shown a freshman side. She plays like a junior or senior. She has basketball blood.”

What may have been more impressive than the way she ran the offense and found open teammates was the way she and fellow guard Alexa Braslow whittled down the last three minutes of the game.

Laney decided to pull the ball out, up, 32-26, and Braslow and Kasmer did most of the ballhandling, finally forcing Radnor to foul and seal the victory.

“You would definitely see pictures of me with a basketball since I was a baby,” Kasmer said. “I really enjoy basketball. My earliest memories go back to four, five years old. I started dribbling on the wood living room floor and my mom would get really annoyed (laughs). She kicked me to the basement on the rug, where I still dribble today.”

Braslow and Kasmer are an interchangeable pair. They both can score the ball, both are adept ballhandlers, both are unselfish and they both look for each other.

“I’m always looking to get Natalia the ball,” Braslow said. “We look for Nat to score the ball. I liked how we came out aggressive and didn’t let any outside noise get in our heads. We played with clear minds.”

Kasmer and Braslow admitted that they will need clear minds against Garnet Valley. The Jaguars’ length and 1-3-1 zone gave the Aces problems (56-21/58-38 losses). The second time the teams met, Lower Merion played without three starters and were only down by three at halftime.

There were some things Lower Merion could bottle from the Radnor victory that it could use. For one, the Aces’ bigs, Ella Liberatoscioli and Megan Walters, did a decent job against Radnor inside.   

Liberatoscioli who was the benefactor of Kasmer’s great look inside early in the fourth quarter that finished a three-point play and provided the Aces with a 32-24 lead in a game in which points came at a premium.

“Garnet Valley is a really good team and there will be some low points in the game, we’ll just have to overcome them,” Braslow said. “What I liked about tonight is we didn’t get frustrated and rode the highs and the lows.”

Radnor will now look ahead at the district playoffs. The Raptors had a tough time dealing with Lower Merion’s box-and-one on scoring threat Nyah Yao.  

“We needed some other people to be more willing shooters and knock a couple of shots down,” Radnor coach Rob Baxter said. “We weren’t aggressive enough. We’re not done. We would have liked to have played better, now it’s time to move on and look forward to districts.”  

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By Quarter

Lower Merion (14-9):  8 | 11 | 8 |10 || 37
Radnor (15-8):  9 | 8 | 7 | 4 || 28

Scoring
Lower Merion: Alexa Braslow 9, Natalia Kasmer 8, Clara Rendle 7, Ella Liberatoscioli 7, Megan Walters 4, Harper Gust 2.

Radnor: Anna Reger 10, Nyah Yao 6, Caroline Quinn 4 Julia Richardson 3, Mia Gjorven 3, Riley d'Entremont 2. 

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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 BlueSky here.