Monday,
March 14, 2016
By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director
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Emily Crevani scored a game-high 20 points for Old Tappan, which took a 23-5 lead at halftime before closing out a
47-36 win over Middletown South as the Golden Knights won the program's first-ever state championship. |
TOMS RIVER -- When the Northern Valley/Old’s Tappan girls basketball team made the trip to Toms River last season for the Group 3 state final everything was new. The Golden Knights were coming off their first state sectional championship since 2007, they had never before gotten past the semifinal round and they had the feeling that, with all of those firsts accomplished, they could enjoy the ride down the shore both literally and figuratively.
Brian Dunn, not known as a head coach to ever let one of his teams take its foot off the gas even for a second, may have even encouraged it.
The result? Old Tappan hit the PineBelt Arena floor with a thud as it fell behind Middletown South 25-5 and lost despite a spirited second half comeback.
Both teams battled their way back to the same place in the same round on Sunday, but this time Old Tappan had experience on its side and a chance to correct past mistakes, the kind of chance that does not come around too often in sports.
“Last year we, myself included, all said ‘Hey, we just ran through and won the section, we are down here and let’s just enjoy it, try to be loose and have some fun.’ But our team, that is not in our nature. We are kind of a gritty and on-edge team and to be a little loose and lackadaisical last year did not really prepare us for the moment,” said Dunn, who, let’s just say, made a slight adjustment in preparing for this year’s rematch. “I was [all over them] the last two days in practice. You would have thought it was the first day of practice. I almost threw some kids out of the gym. It was all about keeping an edge. This was not just some trip where we were coming down here to just enjoy the atmosphere.”
Funny how it works out. Determined to enjoy themselves last year, the Knights had a miserable time of it. Determined to enter the Pine Belt spitting fire this year, Old Tappan could not have had much more fun as it completely turned the tables on the defending champion. Down 25-5 last year to start, Old Tappan opened a 23-5 advantage this time around, holding Middletown South scoreless for the entirety of the second quarter while building a lead plenty big enough to withstand the Eagles’ expected second half charge.
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Freshman point giard Isla Brennan scored a team-high 13 points for Middletown South. |
Old Tappan led by as many as 21 in the second half and after letting Middletown get as close as six at the 3:08 mark of the final quarter, made one final push on the way to a 47-36 victory and the school’s first-ever outright state basketball championship. The Knights are now the Group 3 representative in the Tournament of Champions where, as the No. 5 seed, they will play No. 4 Lenape in the opening round in Toms River on Wednesday in a 5:30 p.m. start.
That’s right…Old Tappan is heading to the T of C.
“In the beginning of the year I wanted to get back here and play Middletown South again so badly because I knew that if we had more time and if we did not come out as poorly as we did [last year] we could have beat them,” said Emily Crevani, Old Tappan’s senior point guard. “I knew that this could be good revenge and we could show what kind of team we really are, but I never really put it into perspective that if we did it we would get into the Tournament of Champions, but just to be in there my senior year…it’s amazing.”
After last year’s final it was assumed that nine of the 10 starters from that game would be back on the floor this time around if, of course, both teams could navigate the mine field otherwise known as a basketball season. It didn’t work out that way as two of Old Tappan’s starters – Alexie Piccinich and Ariana Chipolone – were lost to knee injuries.
That might have played into Middletown South strategy as it came out in an awkward defense that looked something like a triangle-and-two. There were two defenders playing Crevani and Kailyn Sytsma in a deny-the-ball, man-to-man look while the other three slumped into the middle to help guard 6-foot-2 sophomore Alex George in the post.
Simple math said that there was no one left to cover Maia Levenshus or Kelsey McLaughlin, the two Old Tappan starters deemed to be the least dangerous offensive threats. Well, Levenshus hit a 3-pointer to put the Knights up 3-0, McLaughlin hit one that put them up 16-5 and Levenshus scored the final four points of the second quarter to give her team the 18-point lead it took into the locker room. In fact, by the end of two full quarters of play, Levenshus had 7 points while Middletown South as a whole had 5.
“They came out and they really weren’t guarding me. They guarded up Kailyn and Emily, but not me and I just did what Coach Dunn always tells me to do: step up, be confident, hit the shot,” said Levenshus. “Making the first one gave me the confidence to take the next one and the one after that. We were all confident and we came out ready to play.”
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Old Tappan's Maia Levenshus scored 7 first half points. Middletown South as a whole scored 5. |
Old Tappan’s competitive edge was apparent on one particular sequence midway through the second half. Sytsma, setting a screen on the wing, was run over by a defender trying to close out on the ball. No foul was called and Sytsma used the play-on to get off the deck and get open at the top of the key from where she drilled the 3-pointer that gave the Knights a 19-5 lead.
Middletown South could not get any kind of traction even after the break as it fell behind by 20 points on two occasions in the third quarter when Crevani nailed a 3 from the corner off an inbounds play to make it 31-11 and George scored off a lob from Levenshus to open a 33-13 spread. Old Tappan’s largest lead of the night came with 3:11 to go in the third when Crevani calmly took an inbounds pass from the sideline and buried a 3 from the top to give her team a 36-15 advantage.
Middletown South needed five straight points from freshman point guard Isla Brennan to close the third quarter just to get back to within 16 points, but those five points finally sparked the Eagles. They kicked off a 14-0 run that spanned the third and fourth quarters and nearly got Middletown South back in the game. Alexandra Balsamo made a 3-pointer and then two free throws to draw her team to within 36-29 and Brennan’s jumper from the baseline made it a 37-31 game with still 3:08 remaining.
But that was as close as the Eagles could get. After going 9:39 between field goals, Sytsma finally made the basket that steadied the ship with 1:28 to play and Crevani closed the game out in style. She ate up the bonus by making six straight free throws in one-and-one situations and made a steal and a layup with 32 seconds left that put the game out of reach.
Crevani (20 points) made three 3-pointers and 7 of her 8 free throw attempts, all in the fourth quarter, in a dominant performance and she got all the help she needed to keep the defense honest. Levenshus’ 7 points all came in the first half as she foiled the opponent’s defensive plans, Sytsma (6 points) kept her defender occupied and unavailable to help and McLaughlin and George each finished with 5 points. Sophie Downey’s two first half field goals represented all of Old Tappan’s bench scoring. Brennan (13 points), Balsamo (12 points), Stephanie Karcz (8 points) and Julia Valkos (3 points) did all of the scoring for Middletown South.
There is no telling how dominant Old Tappan might be right now or how much further it could go if it had the services of Chipolone and Piccinich as the pair combined for 28 of the Knights’ 42 points in last year’s state final. But Old Tappan has had time to adjust its style and reinvent itself. It also had had the blessing of those that would be left out.
“Obviously it meant a lot to us getting here last year, but the meaning is so much more intensified this year. We went through so much with two of our starters getting hurt, that really took a toll on us. Not even talent wise -- it did because they are great players – but team wise, too. We have been playing together forever now,” said McLaughlin. “For someone like [Ariana Chipolone], someone who loves the sport and was one of the key offensive players to our team, for her to be like ‘Guys, I really want you to do well,’ it means a lot. Someone [in that position] could say that she’d rather see us lose without her because that would show that we needed her to win, but she is just a great team player. She wanted us to do our best and give it our all.”
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