McCaskey basketball postmortem: the JV squad played a very rare 22-game schedule of its own and finished 9-13, 3-7 against divisional competition and 6-5 at home. Avery Stauffer led the club in points (234) and average (12.3), he was the only player to average double figures. Sixteen players were on the roster, eight of them also appeared in a varsity game. The story of the varsity season could easily be told in two parts. Through nine games the club was 4-5, in game #10 Jared Kumah was lost for the duration with a lower-body injury. JPM lost that night but won its next game to reach the midpoint at 5-6. From there the bottom dropped out, the club went just 2-9 in the back half and finished 7-15. There is no question that any team losing its leading scorer will be hampered but the team simply never recovered from Jared's absence. The club was 4-6 within the division and 4-7 at home. The average margin of victory was 7.1 points, the average loss was by 17.1. De'Andre Jones led in points (288) and average (16.0), Jared averaged 14.7 in the ten games he appeared in. Seventeen players appeared in at least one game including seven listed as seniors, not all were still around at season's end but that's the usual battle of attrition we seem to face year after year. On Sunday the 11th the booster club sponsored a team outing to a college basketball game in Philadelphia, we left at 10:00 for the noon tipoff at the Wells Fargo Center. I'd been there before for hockey games but not in better than twenty years (at least), this was obviously my first time there for basketball and for most of the kids it was their first time there at all. Villanova (one of Philadelphia's fabled City Six) was the home team, they hosted league rival Seton Hall (from northern New Jersey, about fifteen miles west of New York City) in a Big East game and won 80-54. Over thirteen thousand were in attendance, by the time we got out of the lot and back to town it was almost 4:30. Take care, thanks for reading.
