Archbishop Wood works overtime to top Abington Heights, reach PIAA-5A final

BETHLEHEM >> Jaylen Stinson dribbled past halfcourt, tossed the ball skyward and immediately made for the bench to start the celebration.

Thanks partially to him and partially to a lot of other guys, the Archbishop Wood boys basketball team was going back to the state title game. It took four extra minutes of play, but the Vikings showed the maturity and poise they’ve worked all season to build as they wore down and finally broke a really good Abington Heights team to do it.

Wood brought its best in overtime and emerged with a 63-53 win over the Comets in their PIAA 5A semifinal Monday night at Bethlehem Freedom High School.

“It’s all about the warm-up and my teammates getting me the ball,” Stinson, who scored six of his team-high 17 in overtime, said. “It’s a mental game, they played with us at the beginning and were making every shot, but my teammates and I kept fighting and kept fighting.

“We knew we were in better condition, we run a lot, so if we kept playing how we have been playing, we’d wear them down eventually.”

Monday’s semifinal pitted the last two teams to win the 5A title against each other. Wood, on its way to the 2017 championship, beat Abington Heights in the same round in the same gym while the Comets came back to win the title last season.

Wood faces Moon out of District 7 in Friday night’s state title game at 8 p.m. at Hershey’s Giant Center.

Early on, it looked like the Comets were going to find their way back to Chocolate Town as they stormed out of the gates on fire offensively. Abington Heights, the District 2 champion, hit 7-of-12 in the first quarter and all three of its 3-point attempts in the opening eight minutes to take a 20-15 lead.

“We’re getting a lot more maturity out of our guys,” Wood coach John Mosco said. “We wanted to wear them down and get them to play man. They play a lot of zone and they play it effectively but we were able to get inside and in the first half, Daeshon (Shepherd) really kept us in the game.”

Shepherd had nine of his 13 points in the first half plus a couple assists while Stinson hit two crucial 3-pointers for the Vikings.

Wood struggled to contain Abington Heights leading man George Tinsley in the first half. Tinsley, a 6-foot-5 senior committed to Binghamton, scored a game-best 26 points and had 16 of them in the first half including all 10 Comets points in the second quarter.

Rahsool Diggins just missed on a three-quarter court heave at the buzzer, leaving the Vikings down 30-28 at the half.

“When he posted up, we knew he wasn’t passing the ball so we got in the lane,” Wood senior Julius Phillips said. “We just crowded him, we knew he probably wasn’t going to pass the ball so we wanted to get hands up around him.”

Wood started to assert itself in the second half with Diggins and Stinson leading the charge on the offensive end. The Vikings rotated defenders on Tinsley, with Muneer Newton coming off the bench to do a great job staying in front of the Binghamton recruit.

On the back end, sophomore Robert Jackson played a strong defensive game for Wood. Jackson, who battled an injury late in the PCL season, recorded three blocks and six rebounds as he helped clog the lane.

“We’ve come so far,” Diggins said. “Earlier in the season, we probably wouldn’t have played defense the whole 32, well, it was 36 minutes tonight. We probably would have gave up especially after (Tinsley) got off.

“You just have to have that bad memory, forget it and move on to the next play.”

The game was tied 42-42 at the end of the third and after the Vikings went up 46-42 in the fourth, they couldn’t hold the lead. Tinsley converted a three-point play then split a pair of free throws – his only miss in seven attempts at the line – to tie it.

Guard Cole Perkins also came up big, grabbing a key rebound off a contested Diggins shot, then drawing a charge on Shepherd that gave the Comets a chance to win at the buzzer. Tinsley got a good look, but the ball rimmed out at the horn.

Wood took it as a sign.

“We noticed in the fourth quarter, they started holding the ball,” Stinson said. “It was kind of a scary shot though. In the timeout between the quarter, we just said keep fighting, we were going to wear them down.”

Two years ago, Wood won the state title with an experienced group led by current Villanova point guard Collin Gillespie and a host of other experienced players like Matt Cerruti, Keith Otto, Karrington Wallace, Seth Pinkney, Ty Pickron and Andrew Funk. Phillips was a reserve on that team but he’s now the elder statesman for a group of mostly sophomores.

As the senior leader, it was his job to help mold the talented but inexperienced Vikings into winners. As he watched Diggins and Stinson take over in the extra frame, he felt a lot of pride.

“I’m so proud of them, they’ve matured so much,” Phillips said. “They may be sophomores but they’re playing like experienced players right now. I got them to it, but they’ve taken it on their own.

“Every time we went into overtime this season, we won the game. So I had a lot of confidence.”

Phillips came up big in OT as well, knocking down five of six foul shots to finish with 10 points. With about 12 seconds left, Mosco pulled his lone senior, letting Phillips get an ovation from the small, but very vocal group of Wood supporters who made the trip.

Diggins hit a runner to open overtime and Stinson followed with two foul shots for a 50-46 lead and that finally broke the Comets.

“Since we were up, they were going to have to come out and play us,” Stinson said. “When they did that, all we had to do was attack it and if you had a shot, take it or if another player was open, give it to him and he’d shoot it. It was all about attacking.”

Stinson hit a charging runner of his own and made two more freebies for a 54-48 lead, then Phillips split a pair at the line and Diggins got a layup off a steal with 51 seconds left for a 58-50 advantage.

“It means a lot, Julius gets a first chance to be the first two-time state champion in Wood history,” Diggins, who scored 15, said. “I get a chance too, but it’s more important the whole team gets a chance to win it.”

The dagger came when Diggins fed Shepherd for a dunk with 21 seconds on the clock, putting the Vikings ahead 61-53.

“It’s for our school,” Phillips said. “We’re doing it for our school. It’d be great to come back and be able to get another banner up, we have to do it for them.”

“It’s a great feeling, our girls lost so we felt like it was on us to get the school to Hershey somehow,” Stinson said. “We’re doing it for them now too, as well as the whole school. We had one a few years ago, but we want another one.”

ARCHBISHOP WOOD 63, ABINGTON HEIGHTS 53
ARCHBISHOP WOOD 15 13 14 4 17 – 63
ABINGTON HEIGHTS 20 10 12 4 7 – 53
Archbishop Wood: Jaylen Stinson 4 7-7 17, Julius Phillips 2 5-6 10, Rahsool Diggins 6 2-2 15, Daeshon Shepherd 6 1-4 13, Robert Jackson 0 2-4 2, Muneer Newton 3 0-0 6. Totals: 21 17-23 63
Abington Heights: George Tinsley 9 6-7 26, Corey Perkins 3 0-0 7, Jack Nealon 4 1-1 10, Trey Koehler 4 1-2 10. Totals: 20 8-10 53.
3-pointers: AW – Stinson 2, Phillips, Diggins; AH – Tinsley 2, Perkins, Nealon, Koehler.