February 6-8

Saturday morning lunch in Quarryville with Jenny, in the evening we were at McCaskey for the opening round of LL playoffs. Our opponent was ELCO (the second-place finisher in Section III), a class AAA school from Myerstown in (E)astern (L)ebanon (Co)unty. The league playoffs often serve up unlikely matchups that would otherwise rarely happen, to my recollection this was our first game against ELCO since I returned to JPM in 1988. The playoff format is usually either Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, for some goofy reason it's Saturday/Tuesday/Thursday this time around. Although ELCO finished 19-3 during the regular season many people favored us to win handily since Section I is allegedly the league's strongest division (maybe, maybe not, but a 19-3 mark needs to be respected). ELCO won the opening tip and immediately ran a play to set their top player up for a slam dunk, he lost his grip on the ball and missed. That seemed to light a fire under JPM, we went ahead 10-0 before ELCO finally got on the board. The lead was eight at the quarter and twenty-one at halftime, the final score was 71-55. Randolph Speller was top man with 24 points, Kobe Gantz had 16 and Ricky Cruz added 13. The victory improves the overall mark to 17-5 and sets up the semifinal round game against a familiar opponent in Conestoga Valley, We met CV in January and won by twenty in their gym but playoffs are a whole different ballgame. Sunday was a typically quiet day as was Monday save for a morning errand run and lunch at the mall. The bracket for the upcoming district tournament was announced on Monday, as the #5 seed we host an opening-round game on the 17th. Our opponent is the #12 seed, none other than (can you believe it) Conestoga Valley (!!!!!) but that's a long way off. There is snow in the forecast for Tuesday, the prediction is for three to six inches which isn't good but after the other weekend it's practically a walk in the park. Take care, thanks for reading.