Spooky Nook Sightings- Vol. II
Written by: Andy Herr on June 30, 2025
Much like the cover photo used for this post, the sun has now also set on Spooky Nook’s 2025 edition of their summer league slate. Additionally, this notebook figures to be a bit more abridged considering how the back half of the month is typically when teams in the league begin to pull the string and have the parachute pop out in regards to their weekly trips over to the Nook with things starting to wind down. Nevertheless, here’s a few final items that caught our eye amid our own travels in helping to try and put a bow on summer 2025. And since this is summer we are talking about, remember to please take all of this with a Titanic-sized grain of salt 😊
Baby Falcons 2.0: Let’s check in with the champs, shall we? Excuse me. The back-to-back champs they would surely want to me refer to them as. The league’s newest bully on the block figures to look a little bit different come 2025-26 as the latest cycle in the now dominant Cedar Crest pipeline is formally flushed out due to graduation. And the rest of the L-L – especially Section One – couldn’t be happier hearing that news. That said, don’t expect to see the Falcons make the “first to worst” procession this coming year. Yes, Crest will be incredibly young, especially with feisty senior guard, Cam Tirado, being one of the few lonesome soldiers returning from last year’s league championship outfit. However, there is far too much pride and peer ownership within the Falcons’ program on the whole to simply allow an “Aw shucks” mentality to ever creep into their collective psyche with the notion of settling ever being an allowable behavior. Yet even if you don’t subscribe to that type of stuff and consider that to be wishy washy at best, consider this. To a man, I have been told – both from Cedar Crest folks and not Cedar Crest folks – that the next upcoming crop might be the best they’ve ever had and that we haven’t seen anything yet. That’s certainly quite a mouthful considering we all remember the mid 2010’s when #33 and crew were wreaking havoc around the conference and District 3 too for that matter. But those guys are still a few years away from even being high school students. In the meantime, with a wide-open Section One race, Crest will most certainly play a part this year. In fact, last year’s Cedar Crest JVs went undefeated I want to say. Granted, going unbeaten in the JV ranks is the ultimate, “I’m not sure what that really means” in the world of high school basketball, but it’s not nothing either. Quite honestly, a like comparison here for the 2025-26 Falcons might be that of their 2021 and 2022 brethren. For those crews saw the emergence of the original Baby Falcons, an incredibly young group playing varsity ball that took their lumps early on in their careers with guys such as Owen Chernich, Fernando Marquez, and Aiden Schomp, before ultimately blossoming into a league champion before their high school careers were over with. We didn’t know their names coming in, but now they are forever immortalized as Lancaster-Lebanon League champs. Forgive me. Lebanon-Lancaster League champs. Now I know for a fact they’d want that to be the phrase I use. Like those teams, there will be rough patches along the way for this group of Falcons. That almost seems unavoidable. But it doesn’t seem like an impossible ask to suggest that Cedar Crest can’t have this group follow along in that same type of trajectory. In short, if you want to get your punches in on Crest, we suggest doing it now. That said, don’t expect them to not swing back. Based on the rumors of what’s coming behind it, the window of opportunity for doing that won’t stay open for much longer. Oh, and remember to print off and take a copy of the roster we’ll have posted on LLHoops to try and get familiar with the names before heading to a game at The Cage this winter. Lord knows I’ll certainly need it.
Purple People Eaters: Alright, maybe they won’t get confused with the Minnesota Vikings of the late 1960’s here in stealing their moniker, but for the two squads that feature purple in their primary color scheme, both Ephrata and Lancaster Catholic have shown some positive signs this month. For the Crusaders, having seen them both at Nook and the area’s other summer leagues here and there, they appear to be making their way back up the Section Three crop. Rest assured, seeing Catholic finish a season with the same number of wins that make up the peace symbol was something none of us — especially them — are accustomed to when detailing their 2024-25 campaign. This summer, it does appear as if Catholic is gradually working out those kinks as June had trudged forward. Ironically, that’s the same flightpath that most Lancaster Catholic seasons take on an annual basis as arguably the smartest X & O coach that the L-L has to offer, Joe Klazas, routinely has his Crusader teams playing better in February than they did back in December. In terms of their personnel, it’s hard not to like Colton Hegener for starters. Well, other coaches around the section may not like him so much seeing as how the rising senior guard’s basketball IQ never puts him into bad situations out on the floor it seems to where he can get pigeonholed. For his troubles, Hegener was the lone member of our LLHoops Section Three First Team selections this past year that either did not play on a team that made the postseason, or was a player already bound for the collegiate basketball ranks. Not bad company to keep. Lancaster Catholic will improve upon their win total in 2025-26 based on what I saw this offseason. I feel rather comfortable saying that out loud without hesitation. Who knows. Maybe quite a bit better depending on how they fare inside a division that gets a bit of a facelift with the other teams around them. For the Ephrata Mounts, it’s a case of starting to lay the groundwork for what the future holds. That said, they certainly hope they build upon last year’s run to the District 3-6A playoffs where they gave Cumberland Valley an incredibly stern test before the Eagles eventually pulled away in due time back in February’s postseason contest for what was Ephrata’s first trip to the district playoffs in a hot minute. Honestly though, it might be easier to refer to the Mounts’ roster as for who isn’t coming back in 2025-26. Brayden Brown? Gone. Cayden Landis? Outta here. Marqus Hardin? Adios. Cooper Truskey? Ciao. All of those key cogs in the Mounts’ machine this past season are now Ephrata High School alumni. So, Grayson Shellhammer, how do you feel about playing the role of older brother? Or dad? Shoot, maybe be grandpa depending on how young the rest of the contingent around him may be this season? But, for second-year head coach, Matt “Herbie” Herbener, having a 6’3 wing with point guard skills in Shellhammer is most certainly not the worst of starting positions to try and build a team around. Similar to Cedar Crest, there’s a lot of promise in what’s coming up the rungs of the Ephrata ladder here in due time. And based on what was viewed at Nook, the future is now for the Mounts starting this season. It’ll be curious to see where exactly Ephrata lands in the grand scheme of the overall Section Two landscape. But they will certainly keep the other teams up at night, especially considering how they seem to have no issues whatsoever knowing who they are in hunkering down and being comfortable playing in a rock fight if such a situation were to arise. I like Ephrata here looking forward being a consistent factor in the upper tier of the divisional chase. Depending on how this year shakes out, I might go from liking to loving.
Red (Golden) Lions: Similar to how it felt as if Milton Hershey deserved their own section of space based on how they had performed at Nook this summer, so too must an equal opportunity be awarded to Red Lion. Admittedly, I became an RL fan from afar after watching them pick apart Conestoga Valley in the opening round of the Cedar Cliff Holiday Tourney this past December. They won’t wow you with “get off the bus” looking talent necessarily, but man, talk about the ultimate mistake in judging a book by it’s cover if you too fall victim to that. If you like an aesthetically pleasing version of hoops, Red Lion is must-see television. The ball never sticks. The extra pass is always made. It always goes inside before it goes outside. It’s just really fun (and enjoyable) to watch. I swear, every time I looked over and saw them playing, the Lions also had to be shooting something like 60% from the field. And it’s not like this is some fad either. Last year, RL was primarily leaning on sophomores and juniors, now juniors and seniors, so the Lions have some significant staying power here in this neck of the woods. The star of the show again figures to be one of those young bucks, Isaiah Ogurcak, as the rising junior guard looked right at home in the 6A ranks of varsity basketball as a 10th grader in posting a sultry 20-point-per-game clip as a sophomore during the winter. At Nook, Ogurcak and his Red Lion teammates have looked just as imposing, including knocking off Cocalico by 10 in a game played earlier this month. If you read this space earlier, you know the optimism surrounding the Eagles coming into this season. Not only that, but Red Lion closed the book on Nook 2025 by taking down a pair of L-L teams this past Thursday night, Conestoga Valley and Penn Manor respectively, including beating the Buckskins by a 95-51 final tally. And I know this doesn’t really mean anything whatsoever in any concrete measure, but that now makes two Red Lion vs CV meetings I’ve seen in the past six months where the margin of victory finished at 35.5 in RL’s favor. Now, I don’t – and won’t – profess at trying to be fluent in the York-Adams landscape, but Red Lion almost certainly has to have a place on the very short list of best squads that the YAIAA has to offer. If for some reason they aren’t however, that’s perhaps even more of a starker tell in describing a possible power dynamic that would undoubtedly lie under the control of our friends on the western side of the river these days in their collective product compared to ours.
And so, that’s a wrap on Spooky Nook 2025, y’all. I would be foolish – as we all would – if we didn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Coach Shipper, Director of Basketball Ops at Spooky Nook, for doing the yeoman’s work of putting together this whole league that features teams descending upon Nook from all over the place. Even different states in fact. We are certainly spoiled to have such a renowned facility located in our backyard where such a mammoth-sized summer league circuit can have a home two nights a week. Provided that he’s able to find some teams, I’m sure there will be an abbreviated Fall League during the month of October as well that Shipper will put on too as has been the case in years past. And thanks to those who took the time to read these little notebooks. Now, we get to exhale a bit before ramping back up. The season will be here before we know it. Thankfully, Spooky Nook provided us all with a fix at least for the month of June.
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