By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
On X @GDsullysays
CHERRY HILL — When you’ve already played 28 games in the span of less than three months, there’s not a lot of coaching left to do. You have to trust in your players to go and make plays.
There wasn’t much coaching Lenape skipper Matt Wolf could have done on Saturday anyway, because his players on the court couldn’t hear him over the roars of the capacity crowd at Cherry Hill East High.
“In an atmosphere like that, they can’t hear what I’m saying, so you just have to let them play, and the kids made plays,” Wolf said. “When we were patient we were getting good looks. We were getting layups. We were just trying to be patient, and they did that. It wasn’t really me, the kids just made plays.”
Second-seeded Lenape made just enough plays to outlast No. 1 seed Cherry Hill East in the South Jersey Group 4 championship game, as a pair of free throws from Nolan Barnes with 6.4 seconds left ended up sealing a 48-47 victory by the Indians, who won their second straight sectional title and third in the last four years. Noahm Marciano put back a missed shot as time expired, leaving the Cougars one point short.
The win was the second of the year for Lenape (20-9, 6-2 Olympic American) over Cherry Hill East (26-4, 7-1 Olympic American), as the teams battled it out twice every season for the Olympic Conference’s American Division title. The Cougars edged the Indians by one game for this year’s division crown.
“We know each other so well because we play each other so often,” Wolf said. “It really comes down to a kid making a play, and our kids, thankfully, made a play or two more. That’s what it came down to.”
“We just stuck together. We were down a little bit with a couple seconds left so we had to make sure we got good plays,” Barnes added. “We know how to play this team because we’ve played them two times (this season). We knew the first three minutes of the game it was going to be a little uncomfortable, but we got used to it and played our game.”
Lenape’s perimeter defense was a big factor, as the Indians limited East — a team that came into the game having hit 212 three-pointers in 29 games, an average of more than seven per game — to just two long-range shots. The pace seemed to frustrate the Cougars, as the score was just 20-17 in favor of East at halftime. East is a team that topped 90 points in a game twice this season, and scored 70 or more 15 times.
“This feels amazing,” said senior forward Mehki Carter, who scored a game-high 15 points. “We’re trying to do what we didn’t do last year, and that’s win states. That’s the next goal. We just wanted it more. We worked all season for this moment, and just wanted it more. That showed in the fourth quarter.”
Carter was held scoreless throughout the entire first half, as he missed much of the second quarter in foul trouble. He took out his frustration in the second half, slicing through the East defense time and again to finish at the rim.
“Him not being there in the first half kind of killed us a little bit, but when he came back, we started scoring,” Barnes said.
Wolf said he considered risking Carter picking up a third foul in the first half, but decided against putting him back in because the Indians were hanging with the Cougars in a back-and-forth first two quarters of action. The largest lead East had was just four points, when point guard Jacob Jones found freshman Jamieson Young in transition to put the Cougars up, 20-16, with a little more than a minute left before halftime.
But three times in the third quarter Carter gave the Indians a lead, including converting a traditional 3-point play that put Lenape up, 28-26, late in the third. He scored a driving layup halfway through the fourth quarter and then added an assist as the Indians took a 40-35 lead. East charged back, taking a 41-40 lead on a baseline layup by Jones, but Carter scored on a press-break layup to put Lenape up, 46-43, with less than 30 seconds remaining. East pulled to within 46-45 on a pair of free throws by Jones with 9.2 seconds left, but Barnes hit two foul shots on the other end for the eventual game-winning points.
“He’s so talented and when he gets going and gets a full head of steam he’s really hard to stop,” Wolf said of Carter. “He can handle, he can put it on the floor, he can shoot threes — he didn’t do that today, which was a good thing because they couldn’t stop him from getting to the basket. He’s been waiting his turn. He played some valuable minutes last year, but he really seized the day.
“We were sitting there, looking at each other, the coaches, and saying, ‘should we put him back in?’ With the score where it was, we thought it was OK to keep him on the bench. We didn’t need to gamble by putting him back in, and that paid off because he played a little freer in the second half.”
Surprisingly Carter, who averages more than 14 points per game and leads the team in six statistical categories, was a role player last year because Lenape was stacked with guys like Tye Dorset, Miles Primas and Aaron Lassiter. Carter scored just 59 points last year compared to 415 this season.
“This is a whole new group, which is really impressive. I tell everybody it takes half a season to really feel comfortable playing varsity basketball,” Wolf said. “When I played, I stunk. I couldn’t do it. I never could do it, because I couldn’t handle my nerves, but these guys — we started off slowly, lost the first two games, but after that there were no nerves. We played big game throughout the year to prepare for this, and the moment wasn’t too big for our guys.”
WHAT’S NEXT: Lenape vs. Montgomery in the state Group 4 semifinals at Central Regional High on Wednesday, time TBD. Cherry Hill East’s season is complete.
