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By Jerome Taylor

When you have young former college basketball players on your coaching staff, sometimes you have to remind them to dial it back. 

Alongside Keith Taylor, Chester’s coaching staff has a lot of Chester-area basketball talent on it, from Shep Garner (Penn State) to Conrad Chambers (Millersville). As a result, his coaches often play against his current team in practice, and they occasionally play above the level that the Clippers will see at game time.

“I had to jump on my coaching staff early in the week because I thought they put too much on the young guys,” Taylor said. 

“They were just beating up on them, so I had to tell them ‘Get y’all behinds off the court,’ and I put another five in there that’s going to play to their level and standards.”

However, the competitiveness of those practices is paying off for Taylor’s squad. After picking up their fifth straight Del-Val championship, the Clippers are now one win away from repeating as District 1 5A champions.

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By Andrew Robinson

Plymouth Whitemarsh’s players knew it was in them and it was time to prove it.

For the first time all season, the undefeated and top-seeded Colonials girls basketball team entered a fourth quarter trailing in a game. No. 9 Haverford had made everything extremely difficult, the Fords bringing the right mix of toughness and physicality that had put PW in a position it hasn’t faced much of this year  and potentially on the brink of title-derailing loss.

They hadn’t had to show it prior to Saturday, but there is a winning mindset in each and every Colonial player.

Thanks to that mentality, PW dug in, rallied back and took control in the fourth to stave off their toughest test of the season with a 36-28 win over the Fords to clinch a spot in the District 1-6A semifinals.

“Playing Haverford and teams like Haverford, it pushes us to be better than we are,” PW senior Jordyn Thomas said. “I think it helps us understand if we make a mistake here or a mistake there, we can get that back on defense or get it back on offense. It showed us we are this kind of team and we can make it as far as we want to.”

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By Matt Smith

Jackson Hicke was still on the floor in the fourth quarter, emptying the tank, even though his team was comfortably ahead on the scoreboard.

The athletically gifted, 6-4 junior forward made everything look cool. With the game well in hand, Hicke delivered a behind the shoulder pass to Eric Vollmer, who converted for an easy layup. That’s the way things are going for the Raptors this season.

Top-seeded Radnor had plenty of fun trouncing No. 4 Upper Moreland in Saturday’s District 1 Class 5A semifinal, 63-35. The victory puts the Raptors in a district championship game for what is believed to be the first time in program history. Radnor plays No. 2 Chester in the final next Saturday at Temple University’s Liacouras Center.

“We love playing with each other and all we want to do is win,” said Hicke, who poured in a game-high 18 points on 5-of-10 shooting from the floor. He went 7 of 9 from the free-throw line and grabbed nine rebounds. “It translates on the floor and it’s why we are doing so well this year. Our chemistry, I think, is really unmatched.”

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By Terry Toohey

It’s hard to believe that Church Farm’s Gavriel Henriquez-Peralta and Brandon Hernandez have only been teammates for one season.

The chemistry the junior guards displayed on the court Saturday made it appear as if they’ve been playing together for years.

“Because we live in a brotherhood at Church Farm and come from all different places around the country that makes us support one another, because we really don’t have family around here,” said Hernandez, who hails from Newark, N.J. “We live together in the dorms and hang around with each other all day so we’ve developed a good chemistry.”

Henriquez-Peralta agrees with that wholeheartedly.

“This is my first year at Church Farm and it shows how quick the bond, the brotherhood, develops,” said Henriquez-Peralta, a native of the Queens section of New York City. “My teammates welcomed me in and that’s how I was able to fit in.”

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Winning a District 1 championship never gets old, no matter how many titles a team piles up.

Just ask the basketball players from Sacred Heart Academy.

Since the PIAA went to six classifications in 2017, the Lions are the only team to win the Class 2A crown.

Second-seeded Sacred Heart wrapped up its sixth straight district title with a 49-32 victory over top-seeded Delco Christian Saturday afternoon at Harriton.

“It’s always exciting,” senior guard Kyra Santora said. “We were nervous this year. We had some injuries and other setbacks, but we wanted to get that sixth one because there are six seniors on the team. We didn’t want to lose in our senior year.”

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By Jack McCaffery

As the head coach at Penn Wood High for 11 years, Clyde Jones usually could figure out most Del Val League basketball mysteries.

One, though, kept him puzzled: How could rival Chichester, so often blessed with good players and tucked in ever-basketball-fertile Delaware County, never have qualified for a single PIAA state tournament?

To find out, he accepted the Eagles’ coaching job five years ago, fought through a rebuilding process, and by Saturday, helped put an end to that question.

With a swarming defense, a late three-point shot from Zaiyin Keys and 16 points from Akhir Keys, Chichester would nip host Sun Valley, 37-36, in a PIAA District 1 Class 5A playback to secure its first state tournament berth.

Behind Jones, who coached Penn Wood to the 2009 PIAA Class AAAA state championship and later took Girard College into the tournament before accepting the Chichester job in 2018, it didn’t take long.

“It’s the reason I wanted to come to Chi,” he said. “They had talent and I just thought it was a budding basketball community. To get an opportunity to start or rebuild a program was just something I was looking for. And being in the Del Val for so long, I knew the area, so I said, ‘I’ll give this a shot.’”

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By Austin Hertzog

The Spring-Ford girls basketball coaching staff occasionally tells its team to ‘rip off the rear-view mirror’ as a way to not dwell on a mistake or the past.

It was a rip-off-the-mirror sort of first half Saturday for the reigning district champion Rams thanks to Central League champion Garnet Valley in their District 1 Class 6A quarterfinal matchup.

“No matter what happens in a game, if you make a mistake we tell them, ‘Rip off the rear view mirror,’” said Rams head coach Mickey McDaniel. “You have 0.3 seconds to be upset with that mistake but then you’ve got to move on.”

The Rams had a bit longer at halftime to dwell upon a 12-point first half that came courtesy of the Jaguars’ devastating 2-3 zone defense, but, like directed, it was left to the past.

Sophomore Katie Tiffan was Saturday’s glass shatterer with an individual 12-point run to start the third quarter that sent No. 11 Spring-Ford on its way to a 40-30 win over No. 14 Garnet Valley to advance to its fifth straight District 1 semifinal.

“Second half we really brought it to them,” said sophomore Anna Azzara. “Great effort on the defensive end and on the offensive end. We were knocking down our shots more than we were in the first half.”

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By Bryan Davis

The boisterous and celebratory chant emanating for the visitor’s locker room at Radnor High School captured the mood quite succinctly.

“Villa to the Ship! Villa to the Ship!”

Villa Maria Academy earned that celebration after rallying in the second half to knock off Radnor, 47-40, in the semifinals of the District 1 Class 5A Girls Basketball Tournament on Friday. Maura McHugh keyed the comeback by notchinbg 12 of her game-high 14 points in the second half.

The seventh-seeded Hurricanes (13-11) will face Bishop Shanahan in the championship at Temple University on March 5. It will be the Hurricanes’ first appearance in the final since winning it all in 2019.
“That was a really gutsy win by our team,” said Villa Maria coach Kathy McCartney said. “We dug in on defense, turned them over a lot, converted some stuff in the second half that we didn’t in the first half. A gutsy win.”

Villa outscored the sixth-seeded Raptors (15-8) 21-11 in the final quarter, holding them to 4-of-12 shooting and four turnovers — 17 for the game.

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Marple Newtown kept its state playoff hopes alive Friday night.

Haley Levy scored a game high 16 points to lead the No. 2 Tigers over third-seeded Upper Moreland, 50-35, in a District 1 Class 5A playback contest Friday. Marple next plays Harriton for fifth place and a berth to the PIAA tournament.

Nikki Mostardi netted 14 points and Mary O’Brien added 11 for the Tigers.

EPISCOPAL ACADEMY 65, NOTRE

DAME 45 » Riley Cassidy went 13-for-15 at the foul line and finished with 25 points to lead the Churchwomen past the Irish in the quarterfinal round of the Pennsylvania Independent Schools Athletic Association tournament.

Amanda Purcell provided 15 points in the winning cause. EA will meet Penn Charter in the semifinals next weekend. Katie Halligan and Annie Greek paced Notre Dame with 11 points apiece.

By Matthew DeGeorge

After a leniently refereed first half yielded just nine total fouls, 10 were whistled in the third quarter, leaving Faccenda and McKee with four each. McKee put Garnet Valley up, 36-34, with a second-chance bucket with 4:29 to play, but he fouled out on the next trip, hacking Hargrove as he banked in a shot.

Hargrove’s basket came on the sixth possession of the quarter, a testament to how the Jags slowed the pace. They were 9-for-15 shooting from the field in the first half, making Methacton extend out, hoping to open cutting lanes through a lanky defense. Jake Sniras not only put Garnet Valley up 34-32 on their first look in the fourth, but they lopped 1:14 off the clock in doing so.

“Game by game, we get more comfortable with it,” Koehler said of the slower pace. “It’s not something as a Garnet Valley team that we’ve been used to the last for the past few years. So certainly some adjusting to be done, but we’ve got a good group of guys and we’re getting better at it.”

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