By Chris Stevens, Editor
Trailing by four with just over 90 seconds to go in Thursday night’s DIAA boys’ basketball semifinal game, Sanford stared the danger of being eliminated in the face and did not blink.
Senior forward Nnanna Njoku scored the game’s final five points and sophomore guard Oliver Jones disrupted Tower Hill’s last gasp attempt at the buzzer, leading the Warriors to a 40-39 win over the Hillers and a long-awaited return trip the state championship game.
“It did look bleak,” Warriors head coach Stan Waterman admitted about being faced with a 39-35 deficit. ” We just told the guys ‘there’s plenty of game left.’ We practice situations like this all the time and it’s never over until the horn blows. We hung in there and found a way to win.”
“We said to ourselves were not going to quit,” said Njoku, who finished with a game-high 17 points. “We came up with the big plays on the defensive end and we knew what to do.”
It looked like the Warriors would win comfortably as Njoku scored 10 first half points to give Sanford (15-2) a 20-13 halftime lead. The Hillers stormed back behind six points from Dean Shepherd to help tie the game at 31 heading into the fourth, and six more from Donoven Mack to boost Tower (13-3) to a 39-35 lead. Tower couldn’t convert the front end of one and ones coming down the stretch and that kept Sanford alive.
Njoku dropped in a basket with just over a minute left to cut the lead to two and after another Hiller miss, he took the feed from Carter Ruby and went up strong for the layup while being fouled. The 6’9 Villanova commit coolly sank the free throw for a 40-39 Sanford advantage, but Tower Hill had one last chance with 3.2 seconds left.
Enter Oliver Jones, who Waterman wanted out there for that moment. The Hillers’ DJ McClendon inbounded to Jaeden Fitzhugh underneath the basket for what looked like an easy layup attempt. Jones swooped in and poked the ball away, running the last seconds off the clock.
“Ollie’s one of our more athletic kids and I wanted my best defensive team out on the floor,” he explained. “He’s committed to playing defense and that’s huge for us. I don’t know if we have another kid athletic enough to recover the way he did on that play, that was outstanding.
“I just went out there and did my job, did what I was supposed to do,” Jones said. “Just tried to stick with my man and not let him get a shot off.”
Now the Warriors will face unbeaten Smyrna (43-42 winners of Salesianum) Saturday at Dover High for the state title. For Waterman and Njoku, it’s a chance to finish what COVID’s outbreak denied them last year.
“It means a lot. All we do is talk about how bad we want to win it all,” Njoku said. “Last year, we felt like we could do it, but we got robbed. This year, we’re on a mission. We have a bunch of guys who want to fight for it and that’s what we’re doing.”
“We’ve been getting calls, texts and emails from guys who were on the team last year, we were all looking forward to that championship last year,” Waterman added. “We want to win one this year, but we’re including last year’s group for this run as well.”
