Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Phelps coach Brian Shanahan said his team was a bunch of “sleepers.”
And he wasn’t talking about their recruiting prospects, or that they were not considered the favorites to win the Pennsylvania Independent School Athletic Association (PAISAA) championship, coming into the tournament as the No. 5 seed.
He meant it literally. At 11 AM on a normal Saturday at the Malvern board school, his Lions would just be getting out of bed–not playing in the PAISAA championship against No. 2 Westtown.
But predictions of a snowstorm Saturday afternoon meant that the finals were moved to the morning, a quick turnaround from the semifinals the night before–and certainly not the usual for Phelps.
“On weekends we usually wake up at 11, because we have brunch at 11:30,” senior Antanas Krimelis said. “So it’s a strange time, but we woke up at 8, we had breakfast, we had a walk-through about what we were going to do in the game, and then we just left for the game–and we were ready, we were ready to win the state championship.”
That readiness might not have been apparent, as Westtown jumped out to an early lead and led by as many as 16 in the third quarter. But thanks to the sharp shooting of Krimelis and a pressure defense that the Moose could not handle, it was the Lions who took home a 50-46 victory.
It was the first time that Phelps had won the PAISAA title, which has been played annually since 2007 between the various private and boarding schools around the state.
Phelps coach Brian Shanahan (with plaque) and the Lions took home the school’s first PAISAA title. (Photo: Josh Verlin)
After the teams received their medals, Phelps’ group of seniors and post-graduates grabbed the water cooler and dumped the icy liquid all over Shanahan’s head–maybe not the most pleasant feeling right before he had to walk out into the snowstorm that had indeed developed during the second half of the championship, but the former Temple walk-on certainly wasn’t going to complain about why it happened.
“I’ve been there five years and every year we’ve been going through our own tribulations, a new group almost every year,” Shanahan said. “And for our school, no words can describe how big it is. Our whole community came.”
That whole community consists of about 120 boys between the seventh and 12th grade, plus various faculty and staff. Of course, it helps that Phelps is literally next-door neighbors with Malvern Prep, where the semifinals and finals were held.
Those supporters were silent midway through the third quarter, when Westtown took an eight-point lead at the half and opened up a 36-20 advantage with just over 11 minutes of game time remaining, and it looked like the Moose were ready to roll to the title after falling short against the Hill School last year.
But then the Phelps School press that Shanahan implemented to start to speed up a Westtown team that had spent much of the second quarter sitting on the ball started to have an effect. A fairly young Moose squad that starts two sophomores and a junior had plenty of trouble with the pressure, throwing away a number of passing and taking ill-advised shots on other possessions.
“In retrospect, what we should have done was basically pull it out,” Westtown coach Seth Berger said. “My fear was that they were pressing us so hard–we weren’t really good against pressure, so I wanted to take advantage out of the press break to get as far ahead as we could, and it didn’t work.”
Instead, what his team ran into was Mike Watkins. The 6-foot-9 senior forward and Penn State signee patrolled the lane at the back end of the press, denying shot after shot around the rim to help the Lions turn the tide.
He would finish with seven rebounds and seven blocks to go along with 12 points.
“It feels good, it feels the best,” he said of winning a PAISAA title in his only season at Phelps after spending his junior year at Math, Civics & Sciences. “It feels so good. I’m lost for words, man.”
Phelps would close the margin to seven by the end of the third thanks to a 9-0 run, and then Krimelis finally got hot.
The 6-4 Lithuanian nailed one 3-pointer to make it a four-point game two minutes into the fourth, and a second from the right wing two minutes later gave his team its first lead since the first quarter at 40-38. After Westtown’s Ed Rupkus (team-high 15 points) briefly gave his team a lead on the other end with a long-range shot of his own, Krimelis would answer with his third trey of the period to make it 43-41 with 2:52 left; his team would not trail again.
“My teammate created a good chance and I just knew I was going to make it, I had to make it, because in the first half I wasn’t really helping my team a lot by scoring, and that’s where they needed me,” he said. “So when I made that, I was just really happy and I just thought we can’t lose this game anymore.”
The Phelps press forced another Westtown turnover immediately after, and then it was one of the smaller players on the court who came up with one of the biggest rebounds. Barcelona native and junior guard Oriol Tres went unchecked on a loose-side rebound, putting it back up off the glass and in for a four-point advantage.
“How about his offense rebound?” Shanahan said. “Kid’s 5-foot-9, 130 pounds. It’s huge, it’s just a kid who is heady and he’s poised enough to get that rebound.”
Two more defensive plays sealed the win: a steal-and-layup by Anwar Epps that restored a four-point lead with 37 seconds left, and then the Phelps press forced yet another bad pass that would become two DaRon Curry foul shots with 18 ticks left on the clock.
Jair Bolden (11 points) knocked down a 3-pointer for Westtown with 8.3 seconds remaining, but Krimelis was able to make one final foul shot with six seconds left to wrap things up.
With Krimelis (13 points), Curry (9 points), Watkins, Epps (four points) and Monmouth-bound big man Mustapha Traore (seven points) all in their final year of prep eligibility, only Tres will return to show the next group of Lions what it takes to win a state title.
“Let’s learn about them, let’s learn about this team,” he said. “We played hard these final rounds, the playoffs, [so] just learn and think the best things and just try to win two times in a row.”
