City of Basketball Love

Michael Bullock (@thebullp_n)
--

CARLISLE, Pa. — Maybe it was the motivation generated by not being tabbed as preseason favorites in their conference — yet again — that had Tim McDonald’s basketball-playing Cabrini Cavaliers cranked up and ready to go.

On the other hand, it might have been Dickinson’s spiffy No. 21 preseason ranking that had McDonald’s remarkably youthful yet tremendously athletic bunch wound up when they stepped inside the Kline Center Saturday night and began to warm up.

And while the visiting Cavaliers enjoyed impressively effective starts to each half — thanks to their spiked energy levels — they still needed to find some resolve and some gas to hold off the host Red Devils down the stretch.

Ivan Robinson tossed in a game-high 25 points, Tyheim Monroe tacked on 23 points and Jair Green finished with 20 as Cabrini warded off a fast-closing Dickinson outfit 87-82 in the season-opening scrap for both Division III basketball clubs.

Deryl Bagwell (16 points) also cracked double figures for the Cavaliers (1-0), who have 13 freshmen or sophomores on their 17-man roster. The 6-7 Monroe, who pocketed 18 second-half points, also grabbed a game-high 11 rebounds.

Preseason All-American Ted Hinnenkamp popped a double-double for Alan Seretti’s Red Devils (0-1), scoring 21 points and snaring 10 boards. Prized freshman Jule Brown added 16 points in his Dickinson debut, two more than Justus Melton.

“I couldn’t be happier with our guys,” McDonald admitted. “They were ranked in the top 20 in the country coming in. I know Al’s a great coach and they have a well-coached team and they don’t make mistakes. They keep you under pressure the whole time and they made a few plays [especially down the stretch]. Luckily for us, our young guys stepped up today and really made plays when they needed to.”

Holding what would seem to be a comfortable 73-54 lead with 8:13 to play when Green canned the front end of a two-shot look, the Cavaliers watched that cushion disappear when fouls forced several players (Bagwell, Green and burly center Sean Mayo) to take a seat next to McDonald on Cabrini’s anxious bench.

And since Cabrini’s ability to take defenders off the bounce — as well as the Cavaliers’ shot-making skills — forced Seretti to go smaller and younger, Dickinson surrounded the talented Hinnenkamp with freshmen Brown and Elijah Wright as well as sophomores Melton and Moses Romocki and began its frantic comeback.

“We’re pretty talented and we’re pretty deep, but along with that comes trying to find the chemistry of who fits well together,” Seretti admitted. “And we’ve been trying to do that for five weeks in practice, but until the lights go on you don’t really know. I thought the group that got together in the second half for stretches really had good chemistry.”

And Dickinson’s on-floor chemistry was able to eradicate the Devils’ 19-point deficit and pull into a 78-78 tie with 2:35 showing when Wright flashed to the tin.

Another tie was forged at 80-all — Monroe’s two freebies pushed Cabrini in front, but Melton tied it off a Hinnenkamp dish — before a Monroe stickback of a Bagwell trey that spun around the rim and out had the Cavaliers up for good.

McDonald’s club then cashed in on five of its eight free-throw attempts to seal it and fend off the reigning Centennial Conference playoff champs.

“We were able to come out and make enough free throws,” McDonald said. “I would have liked to make more, but the young guys stepped up to the foul line and did what they were supposed to do and we were able to pull out a great win tonight.”

“We’ve got to learn from that, that you’ve got to play with urgency every single time,” Seretti lamented. “We’re at a place with our program with the expectations that we have where having a good fight isn’t good enough, especially at home.”

What bothered Seretti was Cabrini’s ability to start quickly in each half.

Robinson, in his first game since having last season short-circuited by injury, was 8-for-9 from the floor in the first half and scored the game’s first seven points as the Cavaliers zipped to a 15-2 lead. Dickinson rallied, pulling within 41-33 at the half.

And with Monroe posting 18 of his 23 after the break, the Colonial States Athletic Conference hammer was able to construct its 73-54 advantage.

Robinson’s chemistry with Green — they were teammates at South Jersey’s Paul VI High School before arriving at Cabrini — also played a substantial role throughout.

“Ivan and Jair are pretty much best friends,” McDonald said. “They live together, so they know how to play off each other. Ivan was in his first game since he tore his ACL in the fourth game last season. … He really put us on his back from the start of the game.”

Seretti added another dimension.

“They have two elite scorers when Bagwell’s shooting the ball like that and I thought Monroe — we talked about him more coming into this that he was the key — and we couldn’t let him bully us on the glass and get the points from four feet and in,” Seretti said. “That’s what killed us. If Bagwell and Robinson go off for 25 and shoot fadeaways, so be it. But when he’s getting four-footers by just being tough, you gotta match that.”

Then there was the 6-6 Brown, the freshman from Lower Merion who added five rebounds, two assists, a blocked shot and all kinds of intangibles to Dickinson’s effort before fouling out in the closing seconds.

“Jule’s a great player,” Seretti commended. “And urgency forced him to be aggressive offensively, which is who he needs to be. In the first half, he was more of just trying to run offense and just trying to find his place. In the second half, he just played basketball.

“He’s a mismatch nightmare and he finished at the rim, he made a [3-pointer], he was good on defense,” Seretti continued. “And he’s a terrific kid to coach. He gets better every day and he works; he’s almost too hard on himself.

“I thought the combination of he and Teddy [was really good].”

Just not good enough — on this night — to overcome a Cabrini attack that had three players score 20 or more and another get 16.

“We’re gonna be tough,” McDonald said. “Our guys were a little disappointed when it came out that we were picked third in our conference. We’ve been picked first the past five or six years or six out of the last seven years, so I think they were a little disappointed to be picked third. So that’s put a little chip on our shoulder and has them ready to come out and play as hard as we can every game.”

And that offensive balance?

Said McDonald: “I’ll take it.”

“I think we get our legs under us, we find out who we are, we’ve got to defend better, we’ve got to rebound better,” Seretti concluded. “We gotta learn from it.

“That’s why we’re playing Cabrini,” Seretti added. “They’re good. They’re gonna have as good a chance as anybody to win that league.”