Spartans’ Seniors Lead The Way As Garden Spot Clips Twin Valley To Claim Route 23 Rivalry, End Season On An Upswing

Written by: Andy Herr on February 8, 2025

Garden Spot Final Team Huddle Of 2024-25 Season

Admittedly, this can be one of the more awkward times of the year.

To put it simply, you’re finding yourself inside one of three buckets here inside the final week(end) of the regular season.

First, you find that the clock can’t move fast enough, and you just want the postseason to start because the only bit of drama left is what your seed line will be. Beyond that, you’re sweating bullets because you’re hovering around whatever the cutoff line is in terms of the bubble forecast for whatever classification you happen to reside within. Lastly, you could also be finding yourself with just a handful of games left in the campaign as your fate beyond this final week has already been determined for some time now.

Obviously, as you go down the line options there, it is a list in terms of the most advantageous positions that goes is ascending order as opposed to top down. That said, on Friday night in New Holland, you wouldn’t have been able to tell as to whether or not these were two teams that knew coming in that they had all of 32 minutes left in their 2024-25 stories.

For the Garden Spot Spartans, a team that came in with fairly optimistic aspirations in what figured to be a fairly wide-open Lancaster-Lebanon Section Two race with windows of opportunity aplenty prior to beginning of the year, this season has been found on the more difficult side of the spectrum all things considered. That said, while the Spartans came in with a 9-12 overall mark before their finale, 3-9 within that aforementioned divisional slate, their late-season spurt found in back-to-back wins against the likes of ELCO and Kennard-Dale respectively allowed them to somewhat flirt with the idea of potentially sneaking into the District 3-5A playoff field, albeit a notion that might’ve been somewhat farfetched all things considered without massive amounts of outside assistance.  

For their opposition, they too probably came in feeling many of those same vibes.

If ever there was an “unofficial” member distinction to be placed upon a program, stamping the Twin Valley Raiders as an L-L school for the 2024-25 boys’ basketball season is probably the closest in history. For starters, the Raiders played exactly half a dozen games this year against L-L League schools, with all other non-Berks County opponents paling in comparison given all of just four foes possessing anything other than a Berks mailing address this winter, including a rare double dip against the Oxford Hornets ironically enough.

Within that nomadic jaunt, the Raiders fared quite well with Twin Valley scoring a 3-2 mark against those L-L schools, a bit of a bright light inside what was a 7-14 record overall complied thus far on the season at large. And hey, from Twin Valley’s perspective, what better way to snap out of what was a nine-game skid coming into their final outing than by defeating their Route 23 neighbors from up the road in Garden Spot to end things on a bit of a high note prior to entering an important offseason for them?

All that is to say, for a pair of clubs who knew what their fate entailed come around the 9 o’clock hour on Friday night, you would’ve been hard-pressed to know much better considering not just how hard Twin Valley and Garden Spot proceeded to take their respective jabs at one another throughout, but also credit needs to be distributed to the Spartans’ students and overall patrons at large here as a largely filled house on this their “Gold Out” night gave this game a bit of playoff feel to it, even if such stakes were not on the table. Fortunately for them, the home contingent at least, their team would indeed give them a solid return on investment by the end of the evening.

White-hot. That’s how you’d have to describe Garden Spot’s offensive start to this one.

In fact, after scoring on their first five offensive trips down the floor to start the contest, two of came in the form of back-to-back triples dialed up by way of Jeff St Jean and AJ Hurst respectively, Spot had raced out to a quick early gap to knock Twin Valley back on their heels right out of the chute.

But without resorting to panic, especially while having to work against the Spartans’ trademark 2-3 zone, exploiting the holes inside of it was the foremost job at hand. In that regard, finding senior big man, Aris Drake, spotting up and knocking down a pair of silky -smooth jumpers for four early points helped breathe life into a Raiders’ outfit that sorely needed a jolt early on.

All told, while Garden Spot would try their best to continue exacerbating the initial difference as evidenced by a Jace Conrad trifecta which then made it a 15-8 Spartans’ lead not long afterwards, a six-point first quarter showing compiled by Drake in totality helped to keep Twin Valley well within the fight after the first period considering the relatively narrow 15-12 lead Garden Spot possessed by the end of it.

Yet come the early stages of the second stanza, Twin Valley had totally climbed out of that early hole that they had been thrown inside of.

Sure enough, following a 3-ball knocked down by the game-high scorer on the evening, Twin Valley’s Carter Schmidt who bucketed a 19-point body of work, the score was deadlocked at a 15-15 stalemate before the Raiders then found their first lead of the evening their next time down the floor as fast break opportunity finished off via an Evan Johnson dish to Riley Gray bucket from point-blank range made it a 17-15 TV lead in due time.

From there, while the Spartans would later retake the lead in the aftermath of an AJ Hurst triple that answered yet another Drake jumper inside of the Garden Spot zone, a Kooper Zdimal layup at the cup ushered Twin Valley out to their largest lead of the evening at the time, 26-22, with all of three minutes left in the opening half.

However, the game’s eventual outcome might’ve ultimately swung on the very last play of the first half as it turned out.

There, even while Twin Valley appeared to have finally settled down and started to figure out how best to dissect the Garden Spot gameplan, a 3-ball knocked down in transition to beat the horn by way of Garden Spot 6’1 senior forward, AJ Hurst, not just ripped the strings for the second of his three treys littered throughout the night, but it also propelled the Spartans into the break while trailing by the slimmest of margins, 28-27.

For players, we’ve all been there. If you’re a senior and you’re playing in your final home game – much less your final game in your career – you don’t want to leave anything to chance, and no doubt left unatoned for. In that regard, for most all the senior Spartans, that would not have to be an unfinished question. And in the third quarter, Ryder Hertzler couldn’t have had a much more emphatic performance to help quell such possibilities from his standpoint.

To say that the Garden Spot 6’5 senior forward was a problem for Twin Valley inside of the third frame on Friday night would be a gross understatement.

To be sure, while his 10-point third quarter tally was good enough to stand on its own, Hertzler’s buckets time after time only punctured massive further wounds into the Twin Valley bubble. Case in point, a well-executed BLOB play that resulted in Hertzler finishing with an easy deuce off the lob pass to then make it a 34-31 Spot lead three minutes into the second half. Later, after harkening back to that aforementioned 10-point third quarter scoring outburst all by his lonesome, it seemed nothing if not fitting that a pair of Hertzler buckets would later push the Garden Spot cushion out to ten points overall as the Spartans had totally flipped this game on its head considering their current 46-36 lead at that moment in time which would later culminate in a 48-36 advantage prior to entering the final eight minutes in the aftermath of their 21-8 third quarter salvo.

However, just when it may have appeared as if this was destined to be nothing more than a Garden Spot coronation following a 3-ball sunk by another Garden Spot senior, Owen Usner, to conclude the Spartans’ first offensive possession of the final period, the door remained open for Twin Valley if they so decided to partake in such generosity heading down the final stretch.

And somehow, following what would be a pair of free throws knocked down by Twin Valley senior guard, Evan Johnson, the sizable Garden Spot cushion that had been in double figures just moments earlier had suddenly been trimmed down to all of six at 51-45 with 3:50 left to play. Then, following a trifecta splashed in by another senior inside of the Twin Valley rotation, Kooper Zdimal, the Spartans’ lead stood at all of five points in the form of a 53-48 difference.

But late Twin Valley surge and all, the Raiders would get no closer the rest of the way home.

In fact, largely due in part to Garden Spot then turning the brakes on their high-octane offense, the hosts would surrender just a pair of points more from their guests inside the final few minutes and change. And behind some clutch late-game free throw shooting authored by another senior in the Garden Spot lineup, Jeff St. Jean, the Spartans were eventually able to reap the spoils of a season-ending 58-50 triumph against a game Twin Valley squad once things wrapped up for good.

From here, ironic in some ways due to the way in which only a left turn or a right turn depending on your location separates these school’s two campuses from one another along on the Lancaster/Berks County border, both Garden Spot and Twin Valley find themselves entering eerily similar territory for this offseason regimen.

From the Raiders’ perspective, Twin Valley bids adieu to a strong senior class of athletes — maybe the best the school has ever had some may rightly argue — the now second-year head man once the horn sounded on this game, RJ Proska, will have to find ways to drum up more than the 19 points tallied from returning players back in the fold – all of which came via Carter Schmidt – as all other players who scored in this season finale against Garden Spot are now getting fit for caps and gowns with the diplomas to boot.

On the Garden Spot side, it’s nearly an exact carbon copy of an overarching narrative.  

In fact, had it not been for a layup inside the second half that came thanks to Sammy Plaza, all of the Spartans’ 58 points save for Plaza’s two scored in this one against Twin Valley are now also slated to head out the door prior to the time next season gets underway. Not the least of which most certainly includes the program’s newest member of the prestigious 1,000-point club, Jace Conrad, as Conrad’s final swan song in wearing a blue and gray Spartans’ uniform concluded in him sharing team-high scoring marks alongside fellow classmate, Ryder Hertzler.

And so, in the event that these two neighboring foes may find themselves pitted against one another yet again come next season, curtain-drop game on the year or not, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what the immediate future holds for both the Spartans and the Raiders congruently. If nothing else though, we certainly know it will be filled with an abundance of youth with in turn plenty to look forward to in the ensuing years to come.

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