Bridgehampton Boys Basketball Reclaims County Championship

From the outside looking in, the Bridgehampton boys basketball team was favored to defeat St. Pius V handily in the Suffolk County Class D Championship at St. Joseph’s University in Patchogue on Sunday. The Killer Bees had defeated the Crusaders three times this regular season and had only lost one game all season, back on December 14.

But, as Killer Bees head coach Carl Johnson said, every one of those positives can be double-edged. Yes, his team defeated St. Pius V three times, but it’s always been said that it can be difficult to beat a team a fourth time, especially in high school basketball. And while the Bees may have beaten the Crusaders by 30 points in their most recent clash, the fact of the matter was that St. Pius had given Bridgehampton its most competitive games in league play all season. And then, as Johnson also noted, there’s the mental psyche of the teenaged student-athlete, which is always so unpredictable.

What came of the fourth meeting between the two teams was a close game that saw big runs from both teams, but ultimately, the more talented team in the Bees won out, 53-42, to reclaim the county title after going just a single year without it. While there is much fueling this season’s team, losing last year’s county championship game to Smithtown Christian stuck in the craw of many of the team’s returning players, including junior Jai Feaster, who scored 14 points on Sunday.

With the win, Bridgehampton will play the winner of Section I and Section IX’s champions in the Class D Regional Final at Center Moriches High School on Saturday, March 15, at 4:30 p.m.

“For us, bringing it back meant a lot because last year we should have got it,” Feaster said of the county championship. “It was kind of robbed from us. Our team wasn’t properly put together. My brother [Mikhail] had gotten in foul trouble early on and he was a big part of our starting five and it was hard on us. So we knew we wanted it this year regardless of anything. It definitely meant a lot.”

But even for the newcomers, like sophomore Xavier Johnson, who transferred in from Hampton Bays, and the Harding Brothers, Jaylen, Jordan and Jackson, who transferred to Bridgehampton from Riverhead, winning their first-ever county title is a testament to all of their hard work.

“We’ve been working day in and day out since November,” Johnson said. “We’ve only had, like, two days off in total, really. Taking shoot arounds over break, practices over break, scrimmaging other schools, and it’s all prepared us for this moment.”

Bridgehampton ended the first quarter on a 10-0 run on Sunday to take a 10-2 lead into the second where that run was quickly ended, but the Bees continued to pour things on a bit. They led by as much as 14 at 17-3 when an and-1 by St. Pius senor standout Matthew Pohalski spurred what wound up being a 13-1 run by the Crusaders to end the first half on, with the Killers Bees hanging on to an 18-16 lead.

A basket by senior Kyle McCarthy at 4:25 in the third gave St. Pius its first lead since scoring the game’s first bucket, and from there, the two teams traded barbs. It seemed whichever team pulled out of it first was going to win the game. A three-pointer by junior Alex Davis, who led all scorers with 16 points, gave Bridgehampton back the lead, and after junior Noah Lawson fouled out for St. Pius, junior Tyler Fitzgerald hit a pair of big free throws with just over two minutes left in the third to give Bridgehampton a 28-24 lead.

Back-to-back baskets by sophomore Jordan Harding early in the fourth pushed the Bees’ lead to 10 points, 41-31, then Davis added a nice layup off a spin move to the basket, and despite a late three by junior Dominic Fantz, who led the Crusaders with 14 points, which cut Bridgehampton’s lead to seven points, the Bees would increase their lead back to double digits before the final buzzer blew.

It is Carl Johnson’s first county title since he came out of retirement last year to return to the Bridgehampton sidelines. He said it was nice to finally win another one, but gave credit to not only his players for sticking with things when the offense got stagnant in the second quarter, but to St. Pius for coming in and really giving his team a competitive game.

“I think the kids were just in the moment,” he said of his own players when St. Pius went on its run midway through the game. “I don’t care how many years you’ve been playing, when you’re in this moment, the lights come on, you’re jittery. The second quarter we just went completely stiff. I had no problem with the defense — the defense was doing its job — but our offense was nonexistent, basically. We missed layups, we missed free throws.”

Johnson said he tried not to mention all of the miscellaneous things coming into the game, such as the fact that his team already defeated St. Pius three times, or that it was heavily favored, or that it had been nearly a month — three weeks and three days to be exact — since its last actual game. He tried to keep them focused on the task at hand as best he could.

“You can never underestimate the psyche of a kid,” he said. “They’re good when you’re scrimmaging or playing a regular season game, but playoffs are different … that’s why I say you never underestimate anybody. [St. Pius] came out and played hard. I don’t have anything but respect for them.”

As Johnson noted, his team’s attention will quickly turn to its Regional Final which it will have 13 days to prepare for, which could be a good thing being that that game has really been the hump that any Bridgehampton team hasn’t been able to get over since it’s last state championship in 2015. They have certainly tried to win that game a handful of times since then only to come up empty each time.

“We’re hoping to crush that this year,” Johnson said, “We’re hoping to get over that hump.”

While the Bees’ opponent hasn’t been decided yet, Johnson said he’s got a pretty good handle of who they might see. He said Greensburgh-North Castle is the favorite to be the Section I (Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland, Westchester) representative, while Eldred, which has a yellowjacket as its mascot, is the favorite to represent Section IX (Orange, Sullivan, Ulster).

To get over that proverbial hump, Johnson said he will have to take a trip, or two, upstate to watch the teams play live in their sectional tournaments. The New York State Hall of Fame coach said he doesn’t like to watch tape of games or live feeds because it doesn’t really give him a good feel for the teams, or their actual size.

But aside from scouting, he will talk to his players about the mental aspect that this time of the season can bring and just how important it is to the physical part of the game.

“We’re going to have to go through ourselves. We’re going to talk about our mistakes here and how they were just too anxious. They didn’t let the game flow to them,” he explained. “We’re going to talk about what we didn’t do and then we go from there and keep going and going and going.”

As for the players, they believe in themselves and they’re prepared to take on anyone en route to reaching the state tournament.

“When we play together we feel like no team can beat us,” Jaylen Harding said.

“Stay focused,” many of the team’s starting five players said at the same time after Sunday’s game. Then Davis added, “stay together as one.”