With Postseason Hopes Dangling, Manheim Township Blitzes Cedar Crest, Responds From Heartbreaking Defeat One Night Prior As Blue Streaks Help Muddy Section One Waters Following 25-Point Victory
Written by: Andy Herr on January 30, 2026
There’s a trend going around on the internet that says, “Not my house, but I know my way around.” Essentially, it’s another way of saying that while you may not actually own or live in the space being referred to, you’re more than familiar with its surroundings. In Lancaster-Lebanon League boys’ basketball circles, there is in fact one program that probably as if it has two homes too. And rightfully so.
Over the course of the last 11 years, one program is responsible for almost half of the league championships during that time. Unless you’ve spent the last decade living underneath a rock, you’re likely aware that the dynasty being discussed here is that of the Cedar Crest Falcons. Yet somehow even more staggering, when you then open the window of achievement out to even making it to the L-L championship game at all, the Falcons have done so seven times since 2013.
Yes, that would in fact designate it to be considered an oddity and a rarity any time in which Cedar Crest now fails to make it to the title after having done so literally more than half the time when going back to that 2012-13 campaign, the first year in which this somewhat quiet and middle-of-the-road program promptly took off and has never once since even bothered to look back.
And the stage for these championship tilts? Why, none other than Manheim Township of course.
All told, any time that Cedar Crest happens to make their way down from Lebanon County and into Blue Streaks’ house, whether it be for their annual Section One matchup against Township or rather that in the league’s finale, the Falcons have probably grown to feel as if they can kick their shoes off and put their feet up on the furniture seeing as how this place likely feels as cozy and homey as their actual home, “The Cage,” does to them now. Frankly, how could they not considering Crest’s 5-2 record in those seven championship games, three of which have come in this decade alone, with the most recent pair coming in back-to-back fashion these past two seasons in 2024 and 2025 respectively.
Oddly enough though, when speaking on those regular season meetings with the Blue Streaks most specifically, those games have in many ways proven to be a turning point in many of the Falcons’ recent championship seasons.
Last year, a 51-42 loss at the hands of Township placed the Falcons at a bit of an early crossroads given that the then-defending league champs saw the loss to Township come right in the middle of what was then a 1-4 overall stretch in early to mid-January last year.
Two years ago, it took an incredible 27-point fourth quarter from the Falcons to ultimately force overtime down in Neffsville before Cedar Crest would later go on to notch arguably the most thrilling win of their entire season, an 80-76 double overtime classic over Manheim Township, for what became Cedar Crest’s first Section One road victory while en route to what would become a 9-1 overall mark – and a section title – once the dust had finally settled.
In 2020 however, the good vibes were noticeably absent once Cedar Crest found themselves departing from Township for the first time that season following what was an emphatic 61-42 loss to the Blue Streaks, a hard thud that came in the Falcons’ final game of the regular season, before having to embark on the league tournament which got underway less than a week later.
The common thread here being of course that 2020, 2024, and 2025 ultimately ended with a host of Cedar Crest Falcons climbing up ladders with scissors in-hand to cut down the nets after winning league championship crowns.
This year, while it remains to be seen as to whether or not Cedar Crest can indeed make it three-straight Lancaster-Lebanon League titles in a row and if Thursday night was just an opportunity to start measuring the drapes, an always consequential Cedar Crest visit to Manheim Township might have seen the prevailing storyline be sitting on the opposite bench entering this year’s edition.
For most fans, their antennas of interest might not truly perk up until we reach the postseason. But whether they like it or not, Manheim Township has no other choice than to be fully engaged and locked in from here on out with their postseason aspirations already sitting right there on the proverbial knife’s edge with only a handful of opportunities left open to them.
In terms of a league tournament spot, it’s still possible, although the Streaks came into their Thursday night date with Cedar Crest while sitting just outside the lead pack taking the form of both Crest and Hempfield. For districts, it’s just as – if not more so – precarious for Township seeing as how the Streaks began the night while stuffed in the #17 spot, two thousandths of a decimal point behind 16th-seeded Mechanicsburg, a critical piece to mention with it being a 16-team invited field. And if that wasn’t already enough, how about having to overcome and bounce back from a literal last-second loss experienced just 24 hours ago – on their home floor no less – as Conestoga Valley, already the Section Two champion, stole a victory on Wednesday night for a W that the Buckskins can only add onto their existing district-bound resume, purely for good measure.
Suffice to say, for a regular season matchup, there were plenty of storylines to choose from in this one, something that always seems to be the case in this game between these two in this specific spot. Oh yeah, if you still want a little extra sizzle, consider this — In exactly 14 days, two weeks to the very day, a league champion will be coronated on this very same floor.
But if the end result will forever be defined as to how it relates to the Cedar Crest perspective, rest assured it will almost certainly be shaded in that of the soul-searching variety. Yet make no mistake. That would only come as a result of what Manheim Township did to them on Thursday night – being absolutely unrelenting from start to finish.
Truthfully, the eventual outcome of this one was never all that much in suspense.
Part of that stemmed from the overwhelming tidal force in which the Streaks exerted on their adversaries right off the top that came punctuated with a 3-ball splashed down by Township junior guard, Ellis Vorhis Witmer, making it an early 8-2 cushion in favor of the hosts with the Falcons still being held to all of two points over the course of the first 4:21 of the evening before a take to the cup courtesy of MT sophomore, Yianni Papadimitrou, made it a 10-2 Township lead shortly thereafter.
And while Cedar Crest would steadily right the ship somewhat and find themselves back with three at a 10-7 difference following a trifecta dialed up by a sophomore of their own, Jackson Smith, two more Township treys over the course of the final 1:50 of the opening frame saw the hosts’ lead expand back out to a 16-7 gap following Gabe Guarino and the other member of the Papadimitrou duo, Manoli, getting in on the act as the MT junior and sophomore tandem ushered Township into the second frame with that same lead, albeit one that could’ve actually been larger in size and stature had it not been for a litany of buckets cruelly rimming-out on them inside the initial eight minutes.
Truthfully though, the Blue Streaks’ advantage wouldn’t lose any ground for the remainder of the night.
In fact, following another pair of Township triples, these sunk by Joe Algeo and Yianni Papadimitrou respectively, the Streaks were found to be in possession of a commanding 24-8 lead with everyone in the admittedly a bit shellshocked, especially those donning the blue and gray colorway of the Falcons.
And while Cedar Crest would finally hit the double digit plateau following a follow bucket at the cup courtesy of their leader scorer on the season, Jemar Pauleus, making it a 24-10 ballgame with 3:10 left in the opening half following the sophomore’s bunny, another Algeo triple, playing on this, his senior night, preceded a Manoli Papadimitrou three-point of the old-fashioned variety, a pair of MT buckets which helped to vault Township into the locker room with a gargantuan 34-12 lead at the game’s recess.
Without a shadow of a doubt, any sort of aspirations held by Cedar Crest in hopes of trimming this massive deficit back down to the size throughout the final 16 minutes absolutely needed to start in earnest. Fortunately for them, their leading scorer on the night, Antonio Tirado, heeded the call to action.
After coming out of the break and slapping on the full-court defensively, the Falcons experienced some early dividends going in their favor. Chief among them, Tirado, an eventual 13-point performer, coming away with three straight finishes at the cup in lieu of Township turnovers within the first minute of play alone that had chipped the Streaks’ cushion down to a 34-19 difference right out of the chute.
But from there, just as they had all night long, Township’s graciousness was extremely short-lived.
While it’s often intimated that if you live by the 3, you’ll also die by the 3, Township was never on the verge of receiving last rites throughout the course of Thursday evening. Especially not when the Blue Streaks were found pouring in 11 triples against Cedar Crest on this night. Speaking of which, following another triumvirate of the bunch tossed in by way of seniors Jack Kenneff and Joe Algeo before giving way to another fired in by junior Gabe Gaurino, Township had suddenly doubled-up Cedar Crest, 50-25, with Section One’s final outlook growing more puzzling and more perplexing by each and every possession quite frankly.
By this point though, it was obvious that the dam had started to break and there were only so many holes that the Falcons could reasonably expect to try and plug up.
And never did that seem to be more apparent than with a smooth pullup jumper knocked down by Township’s 5’10 junior guard, R.J. Bailey, before an unimpeded baseline drive and two-handed finish at the cup from Yianni Papadimitrou closed the book on the third quarter with Manheim Township doing what might’ve seemed farfetched and blasphemous coming into the night, triggering the mercy-rule upon Cedar Crest, with the count reading 56-27 in the Streaks’ favor.
Shortly after the fourth quarter had commenced, that would indeed come to fruition.
Specifically, it crystallize following yet another easy Yianni Papadimitrou bucket at the cup which made it 62-32, good for two en route to his game-high scoring output found in a 16-point showing, before a Kenneff 3-ball, a three-point addition to his 14-point night at the office as well, later made it an eye-popping 31-point lead, 65-34, with not even half of the final stanza having yet been expired.
The good news though? The fact that plenty of time remained for Township to truly make the most of these senior night festivities. And that they would.
Definitively, there was no louder ovation experienced at any point throughout the duration of Thursday night’s affair than when one of those seniors, Ben Faranda-Dietrich, came up with a steal before finishing his theft off with a bucket at the cup, right in front of the Township student section, making it a 71-44 lead with time now melting off the game clock given the running clock situation.
All in all, even taking what became an emphatic 71-46 final verdict aside for just a second, there was more than an ample amount of evidence as to why this game, this performance, could be described as Township’s masterpiece.
Chief among them, the fact that the Blue Streaks put a staggering amount of players into the scorebook with points, 10 to exact, a figure that conversely bested Cedar Crest’s scoring participation by two. Besides that, the fact that MT seniors Jack Kenneff and Joe Algeo finished second and third in Township’s scoring output with 14 and 13 points respectively, with the trifecta’s final member, Ben Faranda-Dietrich, getting the loudest roar of the night as mentioned.
Oh yeah, let’s also not totally gloss over the fact that Township, fighting for every form of its postseason existence, lost at buzzer the night prior, only to then witness their JV team experience an nearly-identical fate in the prelude to the varsity game against Cedar Crest on Thursday evening in overtime. Needless to say, pretty heady stuff from a group of guys who woke up on Thursday morning and found themselves with their backs up against the wall.
“I felt like we were pretty locked-in before the game in the locker room. We start here,” Manheim Township head coach, Matt Johns, said standing outside the team’s victorious quarters postgame on Thursday. “We do film at 5 (o’clock), get shots up, go to the locker room. That’s our routine,” Johns shared. “Sometimes, you can get a bad vibe off of that alone, but I felt like we were pretty well locked-in.”
And how.
“The other thing is, I don’t think we were asking them to do a lot differently than what we did last night,” the Streaks’ 11th-year man said when referencing his team’s heart-breaking 68-67 setback one night prior. “I do think Conestoga Valley helped us because (the Buckskins) have a guard that likes to get downhill, and we had to defend that for 32 minutes. We defended that better tonight…We had to adjust a little bit because of what (Cedar Crest) does to get downhill, but we were doing that last night. We just had to reproduce it again tonight with just a few tweaks.”
That, along with some tinkering – albeit not of the major variety – to help reverse course on what was an 18-point loss to Cedar Crest in the season’s first meeting back in early January as well.
“We showed them things from the first game,” Johns said of the defensive scheme from game one to game two against the Falcons. “Like, ‘You’re here, but you need to be here. If you can be five feet more here in this direction, and five feet more in this direction, that’s all you have to do.’ We just kept drawing it and showing it, drawing it and showing it. And they did it” said Johns of the implementation of his team’s said battle plans. “That’s the hard part. If you watch a basketball game, it’s really a game of mistakes and plays. We made those plays. And we made so few mistakes early on.”
Yet for a roster full of players who one might reasonably expect to have their eyes looking elsewhere whether it comes either future opportunities presented to them and/or an upcoming sports season that may perhaps be their primary focus, as Johns alluded to, this is a group that is all-in on making this Blue Streaks’ basketball team play beyond the regular season.
“Joe Algeo, he has 13 points tonight. He’s an important, important lacrosse player. Ellis Vorhis Witmer, he’s important for us defensively because he can guard, rebound, and defend a lot of different positions. He plays lacrosse, and we’re not going to have him Saturday (against Exeter) because he’s going on his recruiting visit,” Johns said of Vorhis Witmer’s upcoming travel plans. “I had no sense that any of these guys were looking ahead to anything else other than this game.”
“Jack, he doesn’t know where he’s going yet. For two sports,” said Johns of Kenneff’s collegiate athletic endeavors that the senior hopes includes both a football and baseball parlay. “(Kenneff) has had phenomenal, phenomenal performances these last two nights for us.”
“I always say, there’s basketball-only guys, there’s basketball-first guys, and we have basketball guys,” Johns remarked. “It doesn’t have to be basketball-first. It can be basketball-first or second as long as we are an important part of the equation. Of our top nine guys, four of them are basketball-only. The others might not be basketball-first, but it’s still important to them and they still show up.”
And when they show up the way in which they did on Thursday night, they have the ability to turn the postseason outlook upside down and right onto its head.
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