ELCO Starts Fast, Holds Off Late Wyomissing Charge As Raiders Bank Memorable Win Inside Wells Fargo Center
Written by: Andy Herr on December 19, 2023
ELCO Layup Lines Prior To Tip
As far as the statistics will lead you to believe, the players that took to the Wells Fargo Center court on Monday afternoon should have had somewhere around a roughly 0.03% chance of being there. Sure enough, depending on what source you decide to cite, the odds of high school players making it to either the NBA or WNBA are almost slim and nil, with slim already having left town days ago.
But not on this day.
Instead, on Monday, both the ELCO Raiders and Wyomissing Spartans boys’ and girls’ teams respectively were awarded with the 100% chance of playing in a varsity game that counts officially on an NBA hardwood floor. For that, a large portion of the kudos needs to passed out in ELCO athletic director Tommy Mealy’s direction.
“This was all Tommy from start to finish,” ELCO boys’ basketball coach Brad Conners said explaining the logistics of how the grand plan came together to make December 18th, 2023, a day no one will ever soon forget thanks in partnership with the NBA’s “Court of Dreams” initiative. “Since (Mealy) has been with us, it’s all about the kids. Like, what can we do to make them have a better experience? And it’s nice too because with Tommy, it’s ‘How can I help you?’ But this is all just a special thanks to him. He deserves all the credit,” said Conners of his boss in securing the opportunity for his alma mater to play on the home floor of one of the NBA’s most storied of franchises.
Even still, for a coach now approaching nearly two decades on the Raiders’ bench who has taken his clubs to Philadelphia thrice before, all in the form of the PIAA state tournament, he too was understandably a little bit giddy at the getting the opportunity for he and his team to show off their wears on a literal and figurative massive stage in front of their dearest families and friends who had also trekked down with them.
“I was excited last night. It really did feel like Christmas Eve,” Conners admitted. “I know Josiah (Hayes) was up at least until midnight because I saw a Tweet he sent out around that time,” he added with a laugh. “He might have had some troubling sleeping too.”
Regardless though, while darn near impossible to ignore all things considered, there was actual business to attend to on Monday inside the second-largest NBA arena.
From Wyomissing’s perspective, Monday was a truly unique opportunity for the blue and white to continue working out their early season kinks and tinkering with things in general as this would be just their second game of the season following yet another long and fruitful journey throughout the high school football postseason, a venture in which a significant portion of the Spartans’ hoops roster partakes of during the fall.
For the “hosts” on this day, the ELCO Raiders, it would be trying to navigate a response effort on the heels of a pivotal early season game in which the group from Myerstown unfortunately let slip through their fingers last week when Lampeter-Strasburg rolled in and then promptly rolled out with a key 56-47 win for their troubles which may very well prove to be vital down the line as the L-L Section Three race heads towards its finish line.
Suffice to say, while Monday would be a memorable day regardless, coming out with a victory would most certainly make the trip to Philly all the more worthwhile. In that regard, while Wyomissing, arguably the top girls’ team this season found residing in District 3-4A, was able to taste victory in the girls’ game held prior, Monday afternoon into evening would prove to be a good day if you fancy yourself as a member of the ELCO Raiders’ camp once the boys’ contest wrapped up.
As is typically one of the worrying features in games played inside the Giant Center for instance, the biggest home that the District 3 landscape has to offer on a perennial basis, shooting and overall depth perception figures to be right there at the top of the list in terms of concerns. Then, try multiplying that ten-fold with pitch black darkness behind the baskets with only 500 hearty souls inside a 20,000-seat building as was the case on Monday. Even still, neither team seemed all that phased by the mammoth surroundings in the early going.
In fact, Micah Gray, ELCO’s 6’0 junior sharpshooter, confidently broke the scoring seal on the day with a smooth pullup jumper to get the Raiders on the board first. From there, 6’4 senior big man, Aiden Schippers, would counter back for the Wyo contingent on the Spartans’ ensuing trip down the floor before a 2-2 trip to the charity stripe courtesy of Kaden Shultz-Tillison which preceded as a smooth floater in the lane via Camden Marquette not long afterwards gave ELCO a somewhat comfortable early lead following the four-point swing.
But speaking of Shultz-Tillison in particular, he seemed right at home as if he was in Myerstown instead of the 76ers’ home confines.
To say that the 6’2 bruising two-guard stole the show for ELCO on Monday, particularly in the first half, would be selling the sophomore guard well short. Sure enough, after undoubtedly getting kick-started with his aforementioned floater a short time earlier, Shultz-Tillison went outside the arc in the latter stages of the opening frame by burying a timely triple –which had to be of the NBA variety given the line on the floor mind you – as the Raiders claimed the 15-8 over Wyo by that time.
And while Schippers would continue his torrid early start in his own right to steer the Spartans’ ship, ELCO was able to keep hold of the touchdown-sized advantage, 17-10, once the opening eight minutes eventually expired.
Once in the second frame, Wyomissing made a push of their own.
For that, the group from Berks County relied on the efforts of Logan Hyde, a 5’11 senior, as Hyde’s hoop plus the harm drew the Spartans ever closer at overtaking the lead.
However, did we mention that Kaden Shultz-Tillison had himself an afternoon?
After seeing his fellow troops start to teeter on the edge of surrendering the lead, Shultz-Tillison responded in kind with a put-back from point-blank range before tallying a layup for the very next ELCO points as the Raiders’ cushion swelled back up to a half dozen at 23-17 with inside of four minutes left to play in the opening half by that point.
And with Shultz-Tillison starting to heat up, the maestro of it all, Dallas George, continued to be his typical facilitating self in getting others involved.
In that respect, the 5’9 floor general was up to his old tricks when he found another impressive sophomore in the Raiders’ rotation, Josiah Hayes, for a pair of bunnies underneath chipped in via the 6’1 wing, successfully swinging momentum firmly back in ELCO’s direction. From there, seeming to be absolutely unconscious given his first half performance, yet another Shultz-Tillison triple, good for a three-point addition to his opening 16 minutes in which he tallied 14 to pace the Raiders’ cause, helped to usher ELCO into the very abbreviated intermission with the Raiders holding serve by virtue of the 32-21 halftime advantage.
In the third frame, while ELCO was largely able to keep Wyomissing at arm’s length, it wasn’t as if Wyomissing was there to soak up the atmosphere without offering much of a rebuttal down the final furlong. Far from it in fact.
Granted, while Dallas George was able to finally reap some of his earlier efforts courtesy of the basketball gods by raining in a trifecta of his own to help get the scoring started to begin the second half, a pair of tough, old-fashioned three-point plays courtesy of 5’10 freshman guard Justice Hardy and 6’1 junior forward Birkley Ziegler respectively, drew Wyomissing ever so closer as the third quarter rolled along.
That said, ELCO was able to keep a lid on the Spartans’ comeback bid by and large as far as the third quarter was most concerned.
Fittingly, in a way that best exemplified ELCO laying the hammer down and shutting the door on Wyo in a figurative sense, a hard-earned bucket at the tin from the handiwork of 5’11 big man, Elliot Kreider, in the waning stages of the period allowed the Raiders to saunter off into the final quarter with ownership of the 44-29 lead.
Suffice to say, if this was truly to be a Cinderella story for Wyomissing with nary eight minutes to play late on Monday afternoon, the time was now if a comeback bid was truly in the cards. Well, in that regard, Justice Hardy certainly did yeoman’s work down the stretch to see that the dream would become a reality for his crew.
Remarkably, while Hardy looked incredibly poised and confident for barely logging much in the way of time on the varsity basketball stage prior to Monday purely based upon Wyo’s abbreviated schedule as mentioned off top, perhaps it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise quite frankly. No, not when you’re a 9th grader and already drawing the attention of some of the premier college football programs based upon your work playing for one of the state’s winningest high school head football coaches of all-time in Wyomissing’s Bob Wolfrum after just one scholastic season in which your team reached the state semifinals. But at this moment time, Hardy’s most critical act of service yet to date was his impromptu 5-0 salvo which came with an exclamation mark in the form of a hoop plus the harm, a rightly demonstrative display considering that he would go on to finish as Wyo’s high scorer on Monday afternoon in accumulating a team-high 15-point day at the office.
Unfortunately, from Wyomissing’s perspective, that would be all the closer the Spartans would get for the remainder of the day.
Ironically, considering that they had largely been the two-headed snake that helped ELCO slither out to the eventual victory –albeit in very different avenues — both Dallas George and Kaden Shultz-Tillison continued to have leading roles down the final stretch.
As mentioned, while George did the bulk of his damage in the truest form of the Christmas spirit by dishing out a bevy of ELCO assists, eight to be exact, the coach’s son of a point guard would be able to tally a momentum-saving bucket in his own right to help stave off the ongoing Wyomissing charge which understandably helped to make the Raiders’ contingent breathe a little more calmly.
And while he was largely locked up and held in check throughout a majority of the second half, Kaden Shultz-Tillison was able to get loose and deliver the final dagger into the Wyomissing comeback excursion with his third triple of the day en route to a scintillating 20-point day he won’t soon forget, helping to make it happy evening for the Raiders’ clan once they settled in to watch the Bulls take on the Sixers in the nightcap of it all considering that the afternoon would conclude with ELCO prevailing in a 60-47 final verdict over their counterparts from Wyomissing.
Afterwards, after receiving the royal treatment that comes with a postgame interview on the floor in the form of the LLHoops.com livestream similar to that of the NBA stars he sees on television, Kaden Shultz-Tillison was both equally proud and thankful at the opportunity he and his teammates had just capitalized on.
“I just tried to do the best I could to help my team get a win because I know this is a really special game for our seniors,” the mature sophomore would candidly mention mere minutes after the life-changing game had ended. “We didn’t have our locker room, so that was different,” Shultz-Tillison would say when asked about some of the differences in general that Monday unique. “We had to do our scouting report on the bus, so that was kind of different and odd. Nothing else was really different though.”
Funny though. While the scouting report briefed on the bus of who may be weak with their left-hand, or who’s a dangerous shooter that can’t be left alone may long be forgotten years from now, the experience in and of itself never will be. Shultz-Tillison was already well cognizant of that.
“These are memories I’ll cherish for a long, long time. Probably til the day I die,” he would say with the upmost gratitude. “It was a really enjoyable experience.”
Of course, the wildcard that comes with games like these are that coaches never truly know what they are going to get from their team, much less when it’s a mundane and routine game on the schedule that is. Even still, Brad Conners was understandably proud of the way in which his group handled the entire day from start to finish.
“They didn’t show any nerves at all did they?” Conners asked out loud in the postgame. “I don’t think (his team) thought twice about it. They were ready.”
Speaking of ready, while Shultz-Tillison may long be remembered for his performance in this one, when you go beyond his 20-point stat line that sticks out in particular, this was a thorough ELCO performance from everyone who contributed minutes.
“He’s a gym rat,” Conners mentioned of his rising sophomore guard. “He lives in the gym. I have to chase him out sometimes. That’s a good problem to have. But they’re all like that,” said Conners of his team this year at large. “I thought Josiah Hayes really stepped up today. It felt like he had a ton of points in the paint.”
And the one feeding and finding the likes of Shultz-Tillison and Hayes on this night, but also guys like Micah Gray and Camden Marquette on any given night depending on who happens to have the Raiders’ hot hand? Their ever-steady point guard, Dallas George.
“He’s the general,” the Raiders’ head coach said without any hesitation. “He’s a point guard, right? We’ve been asking him to do a lot over the last few years and we’re going to ask him to do a lot this year too, but he is a calming influence out there no doubt. He’s been that for us the last four, five games. Logan Kless has also done a great job handling the ball too.”
“I’m just excited for these guys and what we can do,” Conners offered in closing. “We just have to tighten some screws up on the defensive end.”
If nothing else, the one thing no one can ever say about the 2022-23 ELCO Raiders boys’ basketball team is that they ever were afraid of the moment. In fact, even for those very privileged and fortune few that are able to crack that nearly zero percent chance of making it to the biggest stages in basketball, even some of them too will fail to ever win a game inside the CoreStates, turned First Union, turned Wachovia, turned Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia. And no matter how far any of their basketball journeys may eventually lead them, they can take with them that albeit for one day, they played with a professional and business-like mentality befitting that of the venue they were fortunate at having been able to play in.
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