Saint Andrew’s dominates on the boards to oust Chaminade in state basketball semifinals
It took the Chaminade-Madonna boys’ basketball team more than half a century — 53 years to be exact — to make it back up to the state final four.
Their stay lasted less than 90 minutes before the Lions headed back to Hollywood after a disappointing and frustrating 68-58 loss to Boca Raton Saint Andrew’s in a Class 3A state semifinal Wednesday at the RP Funding Center.
Saint Andrew’s advances to the 3A championship Saturday, when the Scots will take on Jacksonville Andrew Jackson in Lakeland. After finishing runner-up in their three other trips to state final in 1995, 2006 and 2013,the Scots (25-5) will go for the program’s first ever state title.
The Lions (22-9) were a frustrated bunch because as hard as they tried, they simply could not win the battle underneath on the boards. Chaminade was outrebounded 45-24 and at one point, through the first three quarters, had been outscored by a whopping 23-2 margin on second-chance points.
“I thought we had a good game plan coming in,” Chaminade-Madonna coach Andre Torres said. “We scouted everything they did and prepared accordingly. I’m proud of our guys as they fought hard the entire game but I think I know what we did wrong. Obviously, the numbers don’t lie. They had more offensive and defensive rebounds, and absolutely killed us with second-chance points and that was pretty much the story of the game.”
Despite a 17-2 margin on those second chance points, the Lions only trailed 30-25 at the half. When Johnny O’Neil came out and scored the first five points of the second half on a three pointer and a driving layup, Chaminade was right where it wanted to be, locked in a 30-30 tie, but Saint Andrew’s proceeded to go on the game’s longest run, a 13-0 spurt to open up a 43-30 lead. Appropriately, the first six points of that run were second chance points.
“Just really frustrating,” said a disconsolate Andre Weir, who is orally committed to the Richmond Spiders. Weir is usually is the team enforcer underneath, but finished with two rebounds and was not helped by early foul trouble.
“We were in there working hard,” he said, “but it just wasn’t happening for whatever reason.”
Seemingly hopelessly out of it, trailing 52-36 with 5:42 left, the Lions put one final desperate run together. A three-pointer by O’Neil with 2:01 left completed a 12-2 run and sliced the deficit to six at 54-48, but they were forced to start fouling a very good free-throw shooting team, which immediately bumped the lead back up to 12 points.
“I never really thought we were out of it,” said O’Neil, who is committed to the American University Eagles. “We always felt like we had a chance, but at times we would shoot ourselves in the foot and felt like we wound up beating ourselves more than they beat us.”
Said Torres: “The first time in 53 years and I told the guys I was proud of what they accomplished. It’s big for this school, it’s big for this program, big for the community. These kids have had to play in loaded districts every year and we were always beating up on each other. This year we managed to do most of the beating up and were able to get up here. Hopefully we can get back.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 8:47 PM.