Youthful Jenkintown tops Harrisburg Academy in PIAA A 1st round

EAST WHITELAND >> The Jenkintown girls basketball team must be pretty good at masking its emotions.

Coach Jim Romano didn’t sense anything different from his team as it prepared for its PIAA Class A first round game with Harrisburg Academy Saturday afternoon. But with all but one of his players new to the state stage, there were certainly some jitters and nerves among the Drakes.

They hid it well though, then turned in another tenacious defensive performance as they took a 40-21 win over the Spartans at Great Valley High School.

“We were all pretty nervous but we had been working hard all week so we were just excited to play a game,” sophomore Amelia Mulvaney said. “We hadn’t played in a week so we were ready to go today.”

Drakes senior Morrin McSherry was the only player with state game experience, with every player on the roster a sophomore or freshman and Jenkintown having missed out on states last year. But these girls had played plenty of big games in their year or two of varsity and that experience showed.

Jenkintown scored the game’s first five points and boosted by a nice quarter from Mulvaney, Ashley Kremp and Caroline Arena, led 16-8 at the end of one. Kremp led the team with 10 points and hit two 3-pointers in the first while Arena had all six of her points in the stanza. Mulvaney put up nine in the game and had four in the opening stanza.

“We have to make sure we play our game,” Romano said. “Defensively we’re pretty aggressive, we have to be and that’s the way we were all year. We wanted to make sure we pressured the ball and got them out of their rhythm.”

Jenkintown has thrived in a high-energy pressing defense all year with its top seven players all pretty much interchangeable in a full court defense. The Drakes are also well-conditioned with Romano saying the players usually tell him how they’re feeling and when they can be most effective in a press.

Much like it did in district games against Phil-Mont and Delco Christian, that press caused mayhem for Harrisburg Academy. The Spartans didn’t score at all in the second quarter, though Jenkintown only scored six of its own and needed 5:02 of the third before finally denting the scoreboard again.

“That’s the thing we do,” Mulvaney said. “We press and trap and defense is something we do all together. We work as a team to get every loose ball and try to get every steal we can. We play as a team on defense and it really helps us.”

Mulvaney said the group has grown much closer through the course of the season and it’s translating in their play right now. At the onset of the season, a state bid was a goal but not something the team felt was a given.

Harrisburg’s duo of Clair Macklin and Laura Mowrey played extremely hard all game and combined for 15 of the Spartans’ 21 points.

But it was the 23 turnovers forced by Jenkintown’s swarming defense that proved too much for the Spartans to overcome. Jenkintown didn’t shoot well around the rim and had an eight-minute scoring drought of its own before Ashley Kremp hit a jumper with five minutes left in the third.

The next possession, Mulvaney bullied her way into the lane, drawing contact and splitting a pair of free throws. The two sequences helped get the Drakes back on track as they scored seven in the third then put down 11 points in the final frame.

It’s a bit of uncharted territory for this group of Drakes, but also one that should serve them well not only next week, but the next two or three years.

“Each game counts and today was a big one for us,” Mulvaney said. “With the pressure we had, we haven’t really experienced that before. For the next game, we’re ready for the crowd and pressure. It’s for next year too, this is the first time we played in this type of a pressure game.”