OVERTIME Hillcrest 87 Bryant 86
In his final year as head coach at Hillcrest, Ken Gershon wanted to do one thing: win a fourth division title.
“I just hoped to be able to raise another banner,” said Gershon, who is leaving after 30 years without missing a game. “For a while, it didn’t look too good.”
That was when his Hawks were struggling at 5-4 and the players were constantly at each others’ throats.
“Guys were arguing all the time,” Gershon said. “I was trying to get rid of some of the street attitude the guys had. I think that’s finally happening.”
And with that, Gershon has a chance to go out on top. With yesterday’s 87-76 overtime win at Bryant, Hillcrest (14-4, 10-1 in PSAL Queens I-A) has firm command on the championship. Bryant fell to 18-3, 9-2, with both its league losses coming against Hillcrest.
Hillcrest is sitting pretty largely because of what Gershon was preaching. Yesterday, several minutes before the game began, Gershon summoned his team during shooting drills to rip into it.
“We were fooling around, not really paying attention to what we were doing,” said Mike Thompson, who scored a team-high 31 points and hit a pair of free throws with five seconds left to force overtime. “It was the kind of stuff we did earlier in the year.”
It took them some time to get going. Hillcrest staked Bryant to a 12-2 lead before starting to play and eventually went up by nine midway through the third quarter.
That’s when Bryant’s Dashawn Warren hit his stride again. Warren, a four-year varsity player, had scored 14 points in the first quarter, but was quiet during the third. He wound up keeping his team in the game practically by himself, finishing with 42 points.
“We had a team effort, that’s why we won,” said John Caban (17 points), who has been a key to Hillcrest’s resurgence. “He can score 50 points, but as long as it’s just him, we’re going to win.”
Still, Warren’s effort, which Bryant head coach John Demas called “Herculean,” nearly doomed Hillcrest. The Owls had the ball with five seconds left in regulation and the score knotted at 68-68, but couldn’t get off a shot. Hillcrest hit 17-of-21 free throws in the fourth quarter and overtime to seal the win.
“This was one of my best games ever,” said a distraught Warren, who has drawn looks from several mid-major Div. I programs. “But now it doesn’t matter.”
Down the stretch, it was clear that Warren was Bryant’s sole offensive weapon and Hillcrest defended accordingly, helped by Marquis Reid’s 10 blocked shots.
“This is the kind of game that we’re about,” said Reid. “We have a lot less bickering and everybody knows what they are supposed to do. Before, everybody just did whatever they wanted.”