City of Basketball Love

Matt Chandik (@MChandik26)
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DOWNINGTOWN —Most freshmen wouldn’t have taken the shot. When teams are tied with three minutes to go, ninth graders are supposed to shy away from the spotlight.

Most freshmen wouldn’t have bounced back from a bad turnover so quickly, either, nor would most freshmen have locked down one of the opponent’s top players with the game on the line.

Will Howard is not most freshmen. Far, far from it.

“Will’s going to be special,” Downingtown West coach Stu Ross said after his team knocked off Bishop Shanahan, 45-43, in Tuesday night’s Ches-Mont battle. “He’s the quarterback and we call him, ‘California Cool.’ He always has that calm demeanor about himself. The moment is never too big for him.”

It wasn’t when the teams were knotted up at 39 with three minutes and change to play.

West’s Wayne Anderson dribbled into the interior of the Eagles’ defense before zipping a skip pass to Howard, stationed in the left corner. The freshman didn’t flinch, either, raising up in one fluid motion and dropping in the corner three that put the Whippets up for good.

“I was in the corner and I got a great pass,” Howard said. “It didn’t feel any different to me. It feels good. I’ve been playing with these guys for a while now and they don’t make me feel like a younger guy.”

Howard finished with 10 points, five rebounds and an assist, but it was a pair of other plays that really cemented his impact on the game.

He and Matt Carson had a miscommunication on an inbounds pass that skittered out of bounds to give Shanahan possession with 1:16 to go. Undaunted, Howard came out and put the clamps down defensively on the Eagles, denying Thomas Ford a good shot. Shanahan got within one when Joe O’Malley laid it in with 3.1 seconds to go, but Matt Carson hit the front end of a one-and-one to cement the Eagles’ fate.

“I didn’t really panic,” Howard said. “I just knew we had to ‘D’ up. Sometimes, things don’t go the way we want them to, but we just have to come back. It’s about how you come back and play on the defensive end. We didn’t really have a specific guy that was going to guard (Ford). We just knew we were going to hard and we knew we had to play him hard.”

It didn’t hurt the Whippets (13-8, 8-3 Ches-Mont) that they had an idea of what to expect after suffering a 46-35 loss in the teams’ first meeting on Jan. 10.

West stormed out to a 10-1 lead thanks to a pair of 3-pointers from Davis Reardon. The Whippets were much more at ease dissecting Shanahan’s zone defense and it showed.

“My confidence is definitely high right now. My teammates are doing a great job of setting me up and being unselfish,” said Reardon, who finished with 14 points. “Coaches always say, ‘keep your confidence high.’ At the beginning of the season, I was coming off of mono, so I was struggling. They told me to keep shooting. I stayed in the gym and got my shot right.”

Despite that, the Eagles (14-6, 8-2) nearly came back on the strength of Ford’s second-half play. The Hofstra lacrosse commit picked off passes left and right and scored all eight of his points in the second half. He combined that with five assists and four rebounds, while David Angelo had a pair of 3-balls to lead an eight-point night.

Ultimately, though, the night belonged to the Whippets…and their unusual freshman.

“That’s why he’s playing varsity and that’s why he’s starting,” Ross said. “We expect him to make those types of plays.”

He’s going to be making them for a while, too.