Dells Column: Feb 24…LL in District 3

Written by: Dell Jackson on February 24, 2019

Column Feb 24

The week that was…District 3 tournament
Andy covered LCDay and Harrsiburg/Crest
Dell was at Octorara/Boiling Springs and Harrisburg/Crest Gallery

Scores….taken from LLhoops scores page:
Feb 18 Monday
5A
Big Spring 37 #2 L-S 50
#9 E-Town 64 Ship-burg 62
#12 Garden Spot 41 N. Oxford 39
#16 Cocalico 68 L Dauphin 74

4A
Boiling Springs 60 #7 Octorara 76

3A
#5 Lanc.Men. 53 Brand Hts 49
#7 Columbia 55 Camp Hill 61
#8 AC 25 Trinity 66

Feb 19 – Tuesday
6A
#10 Warwick 51 Central York 82
#11 Manheim Township 69 Central Dauphin 55
#12 Hempfield 42 Harrisburg 53

Feb 21 Thursday
1A
L Christian 39 LC Day 71

3A
Lanc Men 55 Trinity 66

4A
Lanc Cath 60 Littlestown 51
Octorara 50 B McDevitt 82
ELCO 34 Berks Cath. 36

5A
E-Town 57 LD 80
Muhlenberg 60 L-S 49
G Spot 38 N York 46
Cocalico 72 Ship-burg. 66
(9th Place Bracket)

Feb 22 Friday
6A
Harrisburg 74 Cedar Crest 71
TWP 55 Reading 68

What’s it mean?
The LL has 2 teams that could play for a District 3 crown- Lancaster Catholic (4A) and LCDay (1A).

Lancaster Catholic plays Sus. TWP on Feb 25 at home. LCday plays Greenwood at home. Both games start at 7pm – LLhoops is planning on covering both games.

6A—Both Crest and TWP (corrected) need to win their game Tues in order to advance to the PIAA (6A takes the top 6 this year). With a W Tuesday, the teams will play for seeding on Thursday. Crest will host Cumberland Valley and TWP will travel to C. York on Tuesday Feb 26.

5A—Garden Spot and Etown have both qualified for a PIAA berth. Both will play 2 games this week to determine seeding. ..and they play each other in the first game- Monday at 7pm at Etown.

Cocalico is still alive but must win 2 games this week in order to play in the PIAA tournament. First up for the Eagles is New Oxford away on Monday Feb. 25.

4A—Lancaster Catholic is in PIAA win or lose. If Lancaster Catholic wins, they will play the winner of Berks Cath/Bishop McDevitt for the championship…. Octorara and ELCO must win 2 games in order to qualify for the PIAA tournament….and they play each other Monday Feb 25 at ELCO.

1A – LCDay plays a tough Greenwood team at home Monday Feb 25^th. With a W, they will play at Hershey for a District crown- that game will be Wed. at 4:30 in the Giant Center. They would play the winner of Berks Christian/Halifax. If the Cougars lose vs Greenwood, then they would play for 3^rd place either at home vs Berks Christian or on the road vs the higher seed, Halifax.

It will be a busy week for the LL boys teams as they will face multiple games – for most.

LLhoops site info….The LL title game was live streamed (we believe it was the first time ever for the LL championship). There were some technical glitches (data resource limit reached? ??), but the game is preserved on our utube page – HERE. We are over 600 views as of Feb. 24. Special thanks to the Warwick/TWP boys boosters for helping sponsor the game. We are hoping to do this again next season (we already upped our bandwidth and have looked at some other solutions to bring you the game with less problems- now were are a secure site!) Special thanks to Circle W sports and Starbright Media for producing the game. Our announcers: Bruce Badgley, Warren Goodling, and Eric Thomas will be featured at the PIAA championships on the live stream for the games. Stay tuned for more info on that.

George Fladeland (@George_W_Flade) produced this video syncing his clips with our announcers: Bruce Badgley and Warren Goodling. Its a bit longer than the one we saw on the twitter earlier. Nice work on the clips and syncing.

The streaming games (Berks and LL) in general produced over 2000 total views. If you have dealings with our sponsors please thank them, as there is NO WAY we could even attempt to live stream archive games without sponsorship.

We continue to grow both on the twitter account and page views. The twitter handle is over 2500 followers and the page views are averaging around 20,000 per week during the season. We have a varied following as folks check into Andy’s, Dell’s, Mike Bullocks rankings, Delaware Beats (a very vocal bunch:)), and of course our Neast Beat by Jon K. Brian P and Bruce Badgley provide video clips from Berks and D11.

We are playing with the idea of possibly doing some radio games next season. …not sure yet.

Misc …
We received a cool picture from some special Dukie fans 2 weeks ago…(yes we will put up UNC pictures if anyone has some good ones- theirs not off the net :)). Recently inducted in Lebanon’s Hall of Fame: Carlos Sanchez with daughter Estella and Chris Blouch with daughter Cameron traveled to Duke.

We also want to congratulate …Tucker Lescoe, Hobart College, on becoming a 1000 pt scorer in college and HS (Cocalico). A pretty rare feat. —Picts/video provided by Buzz Lescoe.

Is anyone not surprised that the 1000 pt shot was a three-ball??? 🙂

John Walk, LNP (@JWalkLNP), and Steve Synder (@sesnyderleb)– baskeball junky from Lebanon, do a great job keeping us informed of past LL players doing well at the college level.

Pat Deiter- Boiling Springs…We received sad news this week with the passing away of long-time coach Pat Deiter of Boiling Springs. I was at the Boiling Springs/Octorara game Tuesday evening. I chatted with Octorara’s head man, Gene Lambert. Gene told me that Pat was in the hospital and was going to have surgery the next day. Via Twitter I found out he died that evening. I remember back in the old days when my teams would go to team camp at Millersville. Pat got into it with Millersville Coach John Kochan about post play in a good natured way (Pat being a big guy and John being a smaller dude :)) The man coached in over 4 decades. He was always easy to talk to and had some great stories. RIP Pat Dieter.

Team uniforms can be ordered from H&L. Tell Olivier that LLhoops sent you 🙂

Coaches interviews…I try to get the winning coach to give us his thoughts on the game. At the Harrisburg/Crest game I talked to Coach Smallwood of Harrisburg. After that, I then talked with Tommy Smith of Crest. Coach looked like he’d had a tough night, but he took the time to talk with us off the record. Tommy, like many of the LL coaches, gave us some time and candid reflections on the game. Its always good talking with him and his staff- we even reminisced about the old days when Tim Speraw was a player at Lebanon HS (I think I coached vs. his Cedar teams 🙂 ) Small world in the LL hoops scene. The Crest staff talked about their studying of Harrisburg and how sometimes the past games don’t predict the current game (like Harrisburg shooting 70% in the first half). So, if anyone is curious about some past interviews- check out our Soundcloud page…

aside..we even talked with Logan Horn on his last second heave to tie the game at Crest “It felt good”

Horns last sec shot attempt..soooo close @falcnation2019 pic.twitter.com/gPI8TD0ODN

— LLhoops (@LLhoops) February 23, 2019

Rumor is you can get Andy to cover your games if you provide him with some team gear 🙂 Believe it or not, Coach Smith allowed us to take this photo after the Harrisburg game.

Another Fan group that impressed me this week. The Falcons Cage group was outstanding. Showed lots of respect and love for the Harrisburg cheerleaders. The school has to be proud of their fans- @falcnation2019.

District 3…the District 3 twitter handle (@piaad3.org) was right on it this week. I was home-bound on Thursday evening so re-tweeted scores in semi-real time. We have a bunch of ‘go to’ guys for finals- always appreciated. The D3 twitter had the scores up very quickly, and the brackets were updated quickly as well. Good stuff for sure. The District 3 tournament has changed a bit in that all games in the first few rounds are played on the home floor of the higher seed. Only the finals are being played at either Hershey or Santandor Building in Reading (6A). “Shinedown” is putting a concert on in Hershey on March 1…therefore, the need to move the 6A finals. With Reading and Wilson in different brackets, there could be one or more Berks teams playing in Reading J. Of course, Andy and Dell would love to cover the one of the LL teams Wed. at the Giant Center. We would also like to thank the District 3 folks for granting us credentials for the tournament.

Lots of HS hoops this week!

Enjoy

~Dell Jackson