Narragansett keeps train pointed at the Curry Hicks Cage, District title game
AMHERST— If you’re a high school basketball player and your team is in the Western Mass. bracket, it’s all about getting to the Cage in March.
The Cage, of course, is the historic Curry Hicks gymnasium on the campus of UMass-Amherst.
Well, the Narragansett Regional boys team got to the Cage Tuesday night. And the Warriors are going back.
After knocking off No. 2 seed Frontier, 60-55, in the WMass Div. 3 semifinals, the third-seeded Warriors, now 21-3, will face top-seeded Sabis for the championship on Saturday at 4 p.m.
“This was one of our goals from the start of the year. It’s just incredible to keep the train rolling,” said Narragansett senior Tyler Dill, who along with senior Ben Edwards led the way in scoring against the Red Hawks, both hitting for 16 points.
Narragansett coach Rich Zalneraitis said he didn’t make any major game plan changes against Frontier with its towering Carey brothers—6-foot-8 senior Peter and his 6-foot-9 sophomore brother, Carsten.
“It was really hard to score against them,” said Edwards, who had the answers from the perimeter, especially in the first quarter, scoring all 11 of the Warriors’ points including a trio of 3-pointers.
“We just played our game, and now we get to play again,” Zalneraitis said.
Reflecting on his coaching style, Zalneraitis added, “I had an old college professor once who was talking about parenting and raising adolescents and he said, ‘You can’t be a railroad track and you also can’t be careless. There’s got to be guardrails on the highway of life with some little adjustments here and there.’ I have wonderful young men on this team and really no single most valuable player. I could give you no less than five names for MVP.”
Of concern heading into the semifinal game was the status of Dill, who injured his left wrist during his high school gym class and sat out the quarterfinal game against Monument Mountain a week ago.
Dill returned against Frontier and matched Edwards as high scorer including a clutch reverse layup under and then over the long, outstretched arms of Carsten Carey with a little over a minute left.
Explaining his injury in gym class, Dill smiled and said, “I was just running, and I ran into a wall, kind of tweaked up my wrist. It wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve made all year.”
“Tyler was ready to go for this game,” Zalneraitis said. “I said to the basketball gods, just let us give this a shot with everybody healthy and we’ll see what we can do.”
What they did was keep the train rolling.
“We went out to West Springfield in the preseason and scrimmaged a lot of great teams there including Frontier, so we had some prior experience against them,” said Narragansett senior Myles Jacques who had six points. And Bromfield, who we played in the Clark had some big guys too.”
And now comes Sabis, a charter school in Springfield, WMass Div. 3 champions four times since 2006, and another strong challenge for the Warriors.
So it’s back to the Cage on Saturday, the same hallowed place where Julius “Dr. J” Erving, perhaps UMass’ greatest athlete, rocked the college hoop world from 1969 to 1971 before his Hall of Fame pro career.
“I like the smell of this place,” said Edwards after the win against Frontier. “It smells just like an old book.”
And speaking of the old days, although 48 years have passed, 1971 remains a very special for Narragansett hoop fans.
“That was the year of our only district championship,” said Zalneraitis. “We look up at that banner every day in practice. We would like to equal that, and if we can, we can do something nobody else has ever done.”
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