By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
On X @GDsullysays
On Jan. 25, the Woodbury High boys basketball team got blown out by Elizabeth, losing by 20 points. Two days earlier, the Herd lost by 16 to Bishop Eustace. They were sitting at 6-11.
They were an also-ran in the Colonial Conference, mired in the middle of the pack of the Liberty Division.
But head coach Mark DiRugeris Jr. and his staff kept preaching to their players that they were much better than their record indicated, and if they kept believing, things would turn around. There was too much talent on the roster for it not to.
When the calendar flipped to February, that turnaround began. A brutal early season schedule that included the likes of Egg Harbor Township, Atlantic City, The Patrick School, Archbishop Carroll (Pa.), Wildwood Catholic Academy, Rancocas Valley and Haddonfield started to pay dividends, as the Herd players began to figure out what worked and who needed to be doing what on a nightly basis.
“We’re hot right now,” DiRugeris Jr. said after Woodbury — the No. 5 seed in the South Jersey Group 1 sectional tournament — knocked off top-seeded and defending champion Pitman on Tuesday night. “We had a long road. I put together our out-of-conference schedule on purpose. We played some high-level teams — some top teams in the state, top teams in Pennsylvania. We faced a long road to get here, but I knew if we played these tough teams and got into a lot of rock fights and scraps, we were going to be tested.”
Woodbury travels to Haddon Township today at 7:30 p.m. to play for the sectional championship, and the Herd’s road to the title game is one of the more interesting ones in South Jersey. They were about three seconds away from being eliminated in the first round of the state playoffs by No. 12 seed Glassboro before Devin Williams nailed a Hail Mary, mid-court 3-pointer that gave the Herd an improbable 57-56 victory. In the next round, Woodbury rallied from a deficit in the fourth quarter to knock off No. 4 seed Audubon, and in the semifinals Williams rained down seven 3-pointers and scored 26 points as the Herd ended Pitman’s dream of a state championship.
“When we put this team together we had a lot of young guys, and having a lot of young guys sometimes causes some (immaturity), but as we played this season, the more games we played, we developed as a team and I saw a difference in the level of maturity, and how they improved from the summer to know is amazing,” said senior forward Jasuan Solomon, who was a sophomore when Woodbury won the state championship. “I wouldn’t want to be doing this with anybody else but this team. Nobody works as hard as we do. Our grind is different and our motto is, ‘we’re tough. Play tough, play free and stay together.’”
“Our coach was telling us to stay confident,” Williams added. “At the start of the season we were playing some tough teams and had some losses, but we just learned from it. It’s all confidence. Our coaches told us to stay confident and don’t give up, and that’s what we did.”
It took a while for Woodbury to gel, as they had some transfers added to the lineup, most notably Williams, who came over from Eastern Regional, and junior forward Jaden Farmer, a Lindenwold transfer. Farmer has emerged as more of a power forward than a guard, giving Woodbury some much needed presence on the low blocks as the Herd doesn’t have a ton of height. Instead, they gobble up rebounds like sharks at a feeding frenzy.
“When you have a new group like this, that’s being put together with a couple guys coming in (via transfer), it’s just about the buy-in. Some of these guys were used to scoring a lot of points for the teams where they were at before, or having a bigger role, and it’s all about coming together and finding your role on this team,” DiRugeris Jr. said. “It takes time. A lot of people wanted us to be undefeated, but that’s not how it goes. But we just kept with it. These kids love to work and they want to prove something, which is great because you can’t really coach that.”
This team seems to take on the hard-charging mentality of Solomon, who sometimes looks like he wouldn’t be the least bit disappointed if a football game broke out on the basketball court. It’s doubtful any 16-year-old sophomore wants to poke his ire by slacking off during a drill in practice. He’s only 6-foot, 180 pounds, but the guy had 300-plus tackles, 37 sacks and eight fumble recoveries during his four-year varsity football career.
“I’m going to miss him so much. I want to keep coaching him. He’s a godsend,” DiRugeris Jr. said of his senior leader. “When you have a kid like that — the last thing he’s worried about is scoring the ball, and that helps your team so much. I tell him all the time, ‘go get me 20 rebounds, find the extra pass, play defense.’ He does everything that has to do with winning. If we go on and win the state title, he’ll be the first in Woodbury history to have two state titles, and that would be phenomenal.”
Can Woodbury go all the way? The way the Herd is playing now, it wouldn’t be a complete shock. They have the shooter in Williams, enforcers in Solomon and Farmer, and a bunch of other guards who can make plays.
“We just have to keep it going and keep believing in each other. When we do that, we’re hard to beat,” DiRugeris Jr. said. “This is what you want. I knew the switch was going to flip, we just didn’t know when. And with the Glassboro game, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. We rode that momentum. I knew it was going to come together, it just came together at the right time.”
