Mater Lakes boys’ basketball regroups after ugly start to advance to first state final
Mater Lakes boys’ basketball coach Dylan Estock sat at a table for his team’s postgame press conference flanked by two of his players - forward Christian Reid and guard Michael Bradley.
Estock was asked if he wanted to start the interview. But point guard Anthony Knowles hadn’t arrived yet.
“Sorry, but let’s wait for Ant,” Estock said. “We do everything on this team together.”
This was certainly true for the Bears on Thursday morning.
They struggled together through an abysmal shooting first half. And then they persevered together, needing contributions from every players who stepped on the court as Mater Lakes made it through with a 47-39 victory over St. Petersburg Gibbs in a Class 4A state semifinal at the RP Funding Center.
“We preach to our team every single day that this game is 32 minutes,” said Estock of his team, which played its first ever game at the state final four. “That first half didn’t go our way, but we found a way to fight through and our sophomore guard (Knowles), 16 years old, found a way to get all of his teammates involved and control the game down the stretch.”
Mater Lakes will now look to make school history together too.
The Bears (27-3) will take on The Villages Charter on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. in the 4A final. If Mater Lakes wins, it will not only be the school’s first state championship in the sport, but overall for the Hialeah-based public charter school which opened in 2006.
Mater Lakes entered the tournament ranked No. 4 in the state and the second-highest regardless of class among teams participating this week in the state final four behind only Miami Columbus.
The Bears didn’t shoot anywhere near as well as a team with that lofty status for the first two quarters, going 5 for 36 (13.9 percent) from the field.
But Mater Lakes trailed only 23-17 at the break because it kept doing two things well, defending and rebounding.
Bradley led the defensive effort with four of Mater Lakes’ nine steals, and also had 14 points and eight rebounds.
“We just worked too hard to get here and in that second half, it just came down to getting stops,” Bradley said.
The Bears built upon those successes in the second half by making a concerted effort to attack the rim and eventually took their first lead 33-31 with 2:07 left in the third quarter on two free throws from Reid, who led them with 15 points and five rebounds.
Mater Lakes shot 7 of 19 (36.8 percent) in the second half, hit 3 of 9 three-point attempts. But most importantly, the Bears made 19 of their 24 free throws, capitalizing on their dominance in the paint.
“I knew coming into the game, being a smaller team we had to take over on the boards,” Reid said. “Defense is what we do and if we kept pushing the ball and getting stops we’d be good.”
Knowles, who finished with 11 points and eight rebounds, put Mater Lakes ahead for good with a three-pointer with 4:49 left in the game during a 7-0 run for the Bears.
“We were gonna stick together and we knew we weren’t gonna let it end that way for us (after the first half),” Knowles said.
This story was originally published March 2, 2023 at 12:59 PM.
