City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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PHILADELPHIA — Andrea Peterson pointed at the walls where the noise bled through her locker room in the bowels of La Salle’s John Glaser Arena and into her player’s ears about a month ago. The Neumann-Goretti coach stressed to her team full of bloodshot eyes that they should remember that sound, that they should be the ones cheering, hooting, and hollering the way the celebrating Audenried team was after winning the District 12 championship.

Peterson told her team that they squandered an opportunity.

She also wrapped a brutal reality around the somber tableau: If they were forced to hear another opposing team revel like that again, their season would be done in the approaching state playoffs and they would have no chance to correct it.

On Saturday, much was righted for the Neumann-Goretti Saints, who avenged their District 12 championship loss with a 61-52 victory over Penn State-bound Shayla Smith and Audenried in the PIAA Class 4A girls’ semifinals at St. Joseph’s Prep.

Neumann-Goretti will now play Catholic League rival Lansdale Catholic (23-5), a 54-16 winner over North Catholic in the other semifinal game, for the PIAA Class 4A state championship next Saturday at 12-noon at the Giant Center in Hershey.

This is the sixth time Peterson has guided the Saints to the state finals in 11 years as head coach, winning the previous five times.  

Smith finished with a game-high 38 points to become the all-time leading career scorer in Philadelphia high school basketball history, finishing with 2,690 points, breaking the previous all-time mark of 2,681 held by former Strawberry Mansion star Maureece Rice. Smith entered the game with 2,652 points, establishing the new standard with 2:16 left in the third quarter with Audenried down 48-39.

Balanced scoring made it possible for Neumann-Goretti (25-3), with sophomore Reginna Baker leading the way with a team-high 17 points, Carryn Easley adding 15, Amya Scott adding 13, six in the second half, and Kamora Berry chipping in with 12.

The last time the two teams met, in the District 12 championship, Audenried overcame a 14-point halftime deficit, placing Smith in the low post and using its superior size to grind down the much smaller Saints.

This time, Neumann-Goretti did not give the Rockets (23-8) a chance to set up their offense, attacking and pressing immediately after they crossed midcourt. This forced Smith to come out and get the ball high, where two and sometimes three Saints would attack her.

It did not bother Smith, who was spectacular, scoring 18 points herself in the third quarter to drag Audenried back to within 50-48 to start the fourth quarter. What Neumann-Goretti’s pressure did was wear down the Rockets, who scored just four points in the fourth quarter on two-of-14 shooting, while turning the ball over four times in the quarter and 22 times in the game.

“People don’t understand that the Catholic League is the best league in the country, and after we won that, we were coming off a high,” Peterson said. “We went coming off the highest high, to the lowest low. We felt invisible. We had to be better as a group, and I had to be better. I reminded them what they heard the last time we played them.

“Our idea was to speed them up and we harped all week about taking charges. Shayla is a generational talent. She was going to score her points. Shayla was going to do everything within her power to win. We shut everyone else down.”

The difference between the District 12 championship game and the state semifinal game was the Saints did not bend this time after Audenried bit into their lead.

Scott was hurting, playing with a 100-degree temperature, though was impactful, keeping the Saints afloat in the third quarter, when Baker and Easley took over in the fourth, scoring a combined eight points in closing any comeback.

“I had to lock in and I felt we should have beat Audenried the first time, and I’ll be honest, we underestimated them, and we paid a price,” Scott said. “It’s why my mindset was to kill everything in front of me. We talked on defense, and on offense, we stayed together. The last game, we didn’t stay together, and we broke down.”

Said Baker, “Our thinking was to get back. We heard them talking. We won; we’re going to Hershey. Personally, I learned from that first game (against Audenried) not to doubt other teams. To be honest, we did underestimate them. It hurt hearing them cheer next to our locker room the last time. We blew it. But we never doubted.”

Shayla Smith ended her amazing career as Philadelphia's all-time leading scorer (Photo by Matthew Chin/CoBL).

Smith certainly caused a lot of doubt. She started out by scoring 12 of Audenried’s first 17 points in getting the Rockets a 17-9 lead late in the first quarter. Then, the Saints slowed her down in the second quarter, while causing six turnovers toward a 26-point explosion. The Rockets’ last lead of the game was 21-20, on a Smith bucket with just over six minutes left in the first half.

Neumann-Goretti went on a 19-2 tear that seized control of the game, giving the Saints a 39-23 lead into halftime.

“We weren’t going to let them come back again, and I remember that last game, we beat ourselves, and I blamed myself,” Easley said. “I could have controlled the offense more, and it was a game we felt that we should not have lost. We weren’t going to let them go again. Sitting in that locker room (after the last Audenried game), that motived us for this game. We had to keep competing and not fall apart.

“Shayla did her thing. No one else did.”

It was a bittersweet finish for Smith, who was too distraught to speak after the game. But it does not diminish her legacy. She ends an amazing career on the top of the pantheon of all-time greats like Shawnetta Stewart, Dawn Staley, Linda Page, Wilt Chamberlain and Kobe Bryant.

If they won, Smith and Audenried would have been the first girls’ Philadelphia Public League team to ever reach the PIAA state championship.

“That’s what breaks my heart,” said Audenried coach Kevin Slaughter, who has done a fabulous job of building the Rockets’ program into a state-championship contender. “Shayla did all these incredible, amazing things and we couldn’t get her a state championship. She’s a champion to me, and to anyone who has ever seen her play. Shayla did it all. That’s why it irked me when I heard parents say Shayla shot too much.

“Do you know where we would be without Shayla? Credit to Neumann-Goretti, they played very well, but I want to be honest, they made great plays, but we made poor mistakes. I will call it like it is, my team was nervous. We made too many mistakes that we normally don’t make. We had players who were turning the ball over in situations that normally wouldn’t in those spots.

“We do have a great future ahead of us with what we have back. But there is only one Shayla Smith.”

By Quarter
Audenried (23-8): 17 | 6 | 25 | 4 || 52

Neumann-Goretti (25-3): 13 | 26 | 11 | 11 || 61

Scoring
Audenried: Shayla Smith 38, Heaven Reese 5, Nasiaah Russell 4, Senaya Parker 3, Ikera Ellison 2.

Neumann-Goretti: Reginna Baker 17, Carryn Easley 15, Amya Scott 13, Kamora Berry 12, Haniyyah Solis-Morgan 3, Zion Coston 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.