By JARROD POTTER
A TOUGH year on court turned around suddenly for Berwick Grammar School’s under-17 basketball team as it claimed a national championship.
Teams from across Australia descended on Tuggeranong, Canberra, en masse last week for the final tournament of the year – the Australian Schools Championships.
Wanting one last challenge with a group that has been together for the last few years, Berwick Grammar School basketball coach and Year-10 coordinator Darragh Howard said the team was hungry for one last shot at a title.
“In the beginning we thought the boys were pretty good basketballers and all the way through they competed in competitions and did really well, but never actually won anything,” Howard said.
“So we went up there (Canberra) just to see how we’d go, because they won a lot of games by blowouts and lost a lot of close ones over the last three or four years.”
With the team members from multiple year levels – a Year-eight, four Year-nines and four Year 10s – the Berwick Grammar side proved too mighty for McKinnon Secondary College in the final, turning around a three-quarter-time deficit to a 58-51 win.
“They won all their games in blow outs and then the grand final came along and it was a really close game which was great,” Howard said.
“It was really close the whole way through – one of our boys hit a three-pointer on the buzzer to put us up by about three points, three-quarter-time I think we were losing, then the momentum changed with about five minutes to go.
“The boys really started to string some passes together and really broke up the other team’s full-court press… we ended up winning by eight.”
Berwick Grammar School’s basketball captain Darcy Brown led the division for points, hitting 134 points, while Joel Laycock (104), Ben Redfern (73) and Nathan Bourne (64) also hit the backboard consistently in the tournament win.
Berwick Grammar’s sister school St Margaret’s was agonisingly defeated 32-35 by Cabra Dominican College in the Under-15 Girls Freshman Gold Medal match, despite the best efforts of Sophie Locandro (11 points) and Eleanor Nichol (8 points).
In other results for local schools, Berwick College had three teams win medals, with the Under-15 Boys Freshman Division 1 downed 46-59 by Barker College, Under-15 Boys Freshman Division 2 bested 33-68 by Rockingham and the Under-15 Girls Freshman side winning a bronze medal match defeating Lyneham 57-36.
