Last night, St Joseph’s faced Farmingdale State for the championship of the Division III Skyline Conference at Farmingdale. At stake was an automatic berth into the Division III tournament. The home team Rams got the job done in front of a crowd of 400, winning convincingly 91-71.
The top two teams in the conference had split the first two contests, contests that came down to the wire, each winning a game on their home court. Both teams finished at 16-2 in conference and Farmingdale was awarded the tie breaker, thus the championship game was played on their home court.
The game started very similar to the last game, won by St Joe’s 91-81. Farmingdale dominated early on the inside as the Golden Eagles had no answer for Brian Robinson or Damien Santana. The Rams started out to an early 17-6 lead with 14:48 left. The Golden Eagles led by their season leading scorers, Phil Lipari and David Acree came back with an 8-0 run to cut the deficit to 17-14. Then Farmindgale went on a 6-0 mini run and made the lead nine, 23-14 with 10:50 left. The Golden Eagles again on the strength of four free throws by Lipari and Acree cut the lead to 27-24 with 6:11 left in the first half. Then after a couple of Ram free throws, David Acree picked up his second foul with 5:17 left. With his other star guard Phil Lipari already having two fouls, St Joseph’s coach John Mateyko had no choice but to have one of his two star guards sit, and thus Acree went to the bench. After a Brandon Freeman dunk cut the Rams lead to 29-26, Farmingdale took advantage of Acree being on the bench and went on a critical 14-6 run to end the half up eleven, 43-32, as the Rams’ Peter Lipka and Davon Jackson scored 9 of the Rams 14 points.
The start of the second half again saw the Rams use their frontcourt advantage as Robinson would score the Rams first four points, two of which started the second half putting the Rams up 45-32. The Golden Eagles though would chip away and cut the lead to 51-44 on a Sean Hyde layup with 16:30 left. But St Joseph’s would never get any closer the rest of the game as the Rams delivered the knockout blow, a 14-3 run led by Lipka, Robinson, and Santana to make it 65-47 with 11:03 left.
The Rams did an excellent job shutting Acree down the second half. Acree would not score his first points of the second half until 4:52 left in the second half. The Rams held Acree to 12 points, 8 under his season average and held the Eagles as a whole to 38 percent shooting from the field. The Rams were led by Santana with 26, Lipka had 19 on 5 of 9 shooting from three, and Robinson with 18 on 9 of 10 from the field. The Rams as a whole shot 51 percent from the field, including 60 percent in the second half.
With the win, Farmingdale wins the automatic berth into the Division III tournament and is now 22-5 overall. St Joseph’s is now 21-6 overall. While the Rams await to see where they are playing in the Division III brackets, the Golden Eagles must watch the live stream at noon tomorrow, and await their fate to see if they are among the other 58 teams besides the Rams in the tournament. If their body of work is correctly analyzed by the committee (which includes the #5 ranking in the Atlantic region), the Skyline regular season co-conference champions, should be in as well.
Comments