The first SAPEC city championship in junior high boys’ basketball since 1997 was worth the wait for the Richard S. Fowler Falcons.
The championship drought ended last Friday with a 61-40 win over the William D. Cuts Crusaders at the SkyDome.
“It’s pretty awesome. Every time we go into our gym now we’ll see a banner up on the wall and we can say that we won that championship for the school,” said co-captain David Shaw.
Incentive was high for Fowler to finish on top.
“I really believe we had all of Fowler behind us and we wanted to win it for everyone who was supporting us in the championship game,” said co-captain Andrew Salcedo. “We also wanted to win it for ourselves because we’ve been working hard all season for the opportunity to play for the championship.”
It was a major victory for Fowler to make the final.
“We’ve come up short the last two years so to win it this year is a great accomplishment,” said Salcedo, the top scorer in the final with 25 points.
Fowler finished in a three-way tie for first place with the Lorne Akins Gators and Vincent J. Maloney Marauders, all at 6-1.
In the semifinal Fowler outscored Maloney 13-4 in overtime to win 76-67.
“We were definitely the underdogs that game. They won the championship last year and we knew they really wanted to win it again,” said Salcedo, 14.
“We had a very slow start and we let them get up on us but we worked hard on the press and we got some steals and we eventually pulled out into a lead. They came back and kept it close and then in the last five minutes of the fourth we had around five or six lead changes.
“In overtime no one scored for about a minute and a half. It was really intense but towards the end of the game we got some more steals and we pulled away.”
The final was somewhat anticlimactic for Fowler after the playoff thriller with Maloney.
“It was still exciting, but the semifinal game seemed a little more intense because it went into overtime and it was much closer,” Shaw said. “We kept the lead most of the time in the final but in the semifinal the lead changes went back and forth and you really had to fight hard to win it.”
In the final Fowler posted leads of 16-7 at the end of the first quarter, 31-18 at halftime and 46-30 after three quarters.
“Our main objective was to come out strong. We have a tendency some games to start slow so we wanted to make sure we got the lead and held it,” said Salcedo, a Grade 9 power forward who tossed in 16 points in the second half.
In the first quarter Carter McCorriston’s five points and tough team defence put Fowler ahead to stay.
“We had a great start. We put most of our layups in, played hard defence and helped out our teammates,” Shaw said. “We never really stopped doing that for the rest of the game.”
Shaw, 15, collected nine points in the win and Leningrad Poserio added seven for Fowler.
Felix Mba pumped in 12 and Luke Stewart and Eric Boychuk had seven apiece for Cuts, a fourth-place 4-3 team that upset the Gators in the semifinals.
“We were pretty strong on defence against them. We stopped them most of the time. We also boxed out really good,” said Shaw, a Grade 9 small forward.
