City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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HAMBURG, PA — They will remember the bus rides. And the pizza in the back of the bus on the bus rides. And the laughs on the bus rides. And the singing on the bus rides. And the giggles and the jokes on the bus rides. And how all the problems in the world seemed to be wiped away on those bus rides.

It is why it was so heart wrenching when the Delco Christian girls’ basketball team took their last bus ride this season on Saturday, after a 54-39 loss to District 4 champion Lourdes Regional at Hamburg High School in the quarterfinal round of the PIAA Class 1A state playoffs.

Lourdes Regional (23-6) will now advance to the state Class 1A semifinals against District 3 champion Linville Hill Christian next Saturday, while Delco Christian saw a highly successful season end, which included a Bicentennial Athletic League championship, and a 25-5 finish.

It was an emotional conclusion for the Knights, who received a team-high 18 points from freshman guard Mary O’Donnell and 10 from senior Hallie Kees, a Villanova track commit.

It was a young team that head coach Jake Godino cobbled together in the fall not knowing how far it could go.

Playing in mid-March, he admitted, was the furthest thing from his mind when he called everyone together for the first practice back in October.

“I didn’t see any of this at all, but these girls committed themselves to the game and began thinking through the game,” said Godino, a 2008 Delco Christian graduate who turned around a team that finished 8-14 last season to more than doubling its win total this year. “These girls became students of the game. When we started 9-0, I started to think we had something here. We showed bits and pieces of being a good team. We had not put together a full, complete game to that point. Once I saw glimmers of that, I started to think 9-0 was not a fluke and this team was very serious.”

This season completed the second-longest run in the PIAA state playoffs in program history, topped only by the 2010-11 Knights that reached the state semifinals as a Class 1A under the older four-class system.

Godino found magic in the freshman guard combination of Ella Stinger, the 5-foot-7 shooter who was selected Bicentennial Athletic League MVP, and the fearless, Energizer Bunny O’Donnell. He found size and athleticism in Kees, a national-level javelin thrower whose best is 128 feet and finished 13th at nationals, and returned to basketball after a year off. He found outside shooting in senior Addie Smith, who regrettably was lost for the season with an elbow injury the first round of the District 1 Class 1A playoffs.

In the end, Godino only had eight players left in the state quarters.

“These girls care a tremendous amount, and this team will be able to get all the way in the future. I’m a competitor like these girls are competitors,” Godino said. “Ella and Mary are special. The best part of this run was all the other small-school coaches who helped me.”

Kees was hit hard by the loss, though she could not help but smile through the tears coming down her face recalling the season.

“I didn’t know what to expect, we had lost so much, and we are really lucky to have such a young team,” Kees said. “This was a great experience. This team has been really close. The lasting memory has to be the bus rides, always the bus rides. We had such a great time. I will never forget how funny Mary is. She was so quiet at the start of the season, and then she really came out of her shell.”

O’Donnell certainly did on the court.

With 4:04 left in the third quarter against Lourdes Regional, and the Knights down, 31-10, the Red Raiders’ Kylia Sandri came up with a steal and she looked free for a layup, when O’Donnell came from nowhere to smack the ball away from behind.

O’Donnell scored 12 of her team-high 18 points in the fourth quarter, and her driving layup with 4:21 to play forced Lourdes Regional coach Mike Klembara to call a timeout when the game appeared to be seemingly in hand.

“That’s her, it’s why I call Mary the Energizer Bunny,” said Stinger, the Knights’ leading scorer who had to leave the game in the third quarter with an illness. “It did hurt me more that I couldn’t be on the court in the end. I didn’t see this coming. I knew we had the potential to be a good team.

“I think what I will miss most are all the times coach Godino got on us, telling us we had the potential to go into mid-March. Getting on us, in a caring way, we had to find our potential, and we got to play in mid-March.”

With Stinger and O’Donnell back, the Knights should be good again.

They will need time to rinse away this loss.

The game was tied once, 2-2, and when the Red Raiders went on a 10-0 tear to close the first quarter, the Knights struggled to stay within double digits. The closest Delco Christian came the remainder of the game was on an O’Donnell trey with 5:22 left in the half, pulling the Knights to within 13-10. Then, Lourdes Regional closed the half on a 13-0 run to take control.

Delco Christian shot 3 of 33 in the half, while Lourdes Regional made 9 of 27.

“This is tough,” admitted O’Donnell, who attributes her resilience from being the youngest of two older brothers. “I think the hardest part is no more bus rides. Hallie and Addie were the lights of this team. They encouraged everyone. I’ll miss going out to get food with the team, because everyone on this team loves food (laughs). The last bus ride was the last bus ride up here. That just hit me. It’s definitely the bus rides I’ll miss. Every time I was with this team, they made you forget about everything else.”

By Quarter
Delco Christian (25-5): 3 | 7 | 8 | 21 || 39

Lourdes Regional (23-6): 13 | 13 | 14 | 14 || 54

Scoring
Delco Christian: Mary O’Donnell 18, Hallie Kees 10, Ella Stinger 3, Audrey Bechtel 3, Niamh Ireland 3, Rachel Rhoads 2.

Our Lady of Lourdes: Hannah Lokitis 22, Kylia Sandri 15, Onaleigh Barnes 11, Vivian Reiprish 2, Anna Keer 2, Sophia Karlovich 2.

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.