Delcohoops.com

By Bruce Adams

The Lower Merion boys’ basketball team captured its first District 1 title since the days of Kobe Bryant with a 62-41 win against Abington in the District 1 6A championship final.

The contest was held, appropriately enough, in the Kobe Bryant Gymnasium, where the Aces won their first District 1 title since 1996.

“Winning it at home means a lot – Kobe’s never far from my mind,” said Lower Merion boys’ basketball head coach Gregg Downer, who coached the Aces when they won the District 1 4A title and PIAA 4A state championship with Bryant in 1996. “Now that we can associate this ball club with his [1996] ball club, I hope that Kobe and Gianna are smiling down from Heaven, and I hope we can send up a [state title] trophy for them to look at.”

With the win, Lower Merion advanced to the PIAA 6A state semifinals, to be held Tuesday evening at the Kobe Bryant Gymnasium.

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By Matt Smith

Alexa Abbonizio has made a high school career out of making clutch baskets.

The Springfield senior did it again (and again, and again) Wednesday night in the District 1 Class 5A championship.

Abbonizio’s torrid fourth quarter, in which she scored all 14 of her team’s points, carried No. 1 Springfield to its second straight district title, a 46-39 decision over Central League rival and second-seeded Harriton.

Earlier in the year, the All-Delco became the program’s all-time leading scorer. She’s been padding her record ever since.

“Alexa’s put this team on her back for four years and she’s been a dominant part of this program for four years,” said coach Ky McNichol, who has guided the Cougars to district championships in three of her first six years at the helm. “What she did tonight was basically say, ‘I’m going to finish for my team, I’m not going to let us go down.’ I told them during a timeout that all we needed was to bury one 3 and we would be OK. So, once she buried the 2 and then buried the 3, I knew we were OK.

“Big players step up in big moments and she’s been a big player for us, game in and game out for four years.”

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By Terry Toohey

There are no championship banners hanging in the Blue Gym at the recently opened, Springfield High School.

Don’t worry, it’s not an oversight. Getting the sparkling, state-of-the-art building up and running in the middle of a school year was the first priority. Adding amenities such as championship banners and the logos for all 12 Central League schools had to take a back seat.

Besides, a shiny new facility deserves pristine banners. New ones are on order for championship teams, individual state champs, 1,000-point members and 100-win wrestlers and should be up in a few weeks, athletic director Glenn Mallon said.

And when those banners are raised, there will be one more to order, after the Cougars claimed their second straight District 1 Class 5A title and third in the last five years with a 46-39 over Central League rival Harriton Wednesday night.

As with most championship banners, it will just reflect the year, not what the team had to go through to compile a 20-0 record, win a league and district championship in the same year for the first time in program history and to do it in the middle of a global pandemic as the Cougars have. It will not list the sacrifices the players and coaches were willing to make just to have a season.

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By Peter DiGiovanni

Tuesday night’s District 1 Class 5A boys basketball championship game started tragically for visiting West Chester Rustin.

It ended jubilantly for the hometown team from Chester.

After two devastating first-quarter injuries for Rustin, the Clippers used a furious third-quarter charge to pull away from a game Golden Knights team, 62-46, for the Clippers’ 24th District 1 title.

Chester (12-1) will now host District 2 champion Crestwood on Friday night in the quarterfinal round of the PIAA Class 5A state tournament. Rustin, on the other hand, is left out in the cold by the new, COVID-19-composed tournament format.

Only district champions get the right to play for a state title this year.

“It feels great,” the Clippers’ Jameel Burton said, “to win a district championship.”

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By Jack McCaffery

If it was District 1 championship night, and if it was Chester High on the basketball court, and if it was nearing spring, and if Hershey loomed in the distance, Keith Taylor would have known what to expect.

There would have been the mob of fans, many draped in orange. There would have been the Chester cheerleaders, legendary for their precision and style, bringing the crowd to a roar. There would have been bright lights at a college arena, maybe Temple, maybe Villanova. The Palestra, even.

There would have been a scene.

“Celebrities,” Taylor, the Chester coach, was saying Tuesday night. “College coaches. Professional players. They would have been there, all of them, to watch a big school basketball game. The Big Stage. The atmosphere. It would have been awesome.”

There was only some of that at 9th and Barclay Tuesday, as the Clippers rolled West Chester Rustin, 62-46 for the district’s Class 5A boys basketball championship. The coronavirus still a shadowing concern, the crowd was limited to a couple of hundred, all on the same side of the Fred Pickett Jr. Gymnasium, their voices coming through loud and clear despite covered mouths. Yet for all those legendary district championship nights in the past, 36 in all dating to 1943 according to legendary Clippers historian Dave Burman, there was something uniquely challenging about No. 37.

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By Neil Geoghegan

Believe it or not, Tuesday evening was a sort of homecoming for Griffin Barrouk.

And just when it looked like the West Chester Rustin star and Hofstra commit was poised for a glorious return to the city of Chester, things went horribly wrong.

When his Rustin squad travelled to meet traditional power Chester in the District 1 Class 5A title game, it wasn’t the first time Barrouk had squared off against this city’s best basketball players. In fact, the 6-foot-5 senior shooting guard has been coming to Chester since he was a pre-teen, testing his skills against the best competition he could find.

The biggest outing of Barrouk’s high school career, however, was also his last. Late in the first quarter, with Rustin trailing by a bucket, he fell to the ground awkwardly while battling against the Clippers’ Isaiah Freeman for a loose ball. It was obvious immediately that this was an injury he was not going to shake off.

“We don’t know the extent of the injury but it didn’t look good,” said Rustin Athletic Director Devon Landgraff.

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