Matawan Basketball: Long Time Coming
Standing alone in the gleaming white hallway at Long Branch High School outside his team’s locker room on Sunday, Matawan boys basketball coach Tom Stead took a deep breath and thought back to how far everything had come in his seven seasons with the Huskies.
“It’s kind of surreal,’’ he said.
In his first season at Matawan, the coach who led Holmdel to two NJSIAA Tournament of Champions appearances in the late 1990s went 0-24. The atmosphere at Huskies’ home games was quieter than the school library. A school loaded with star athletes and championship teams in football and track gave a collective shrug when it came to basketball. The basketball banner on the wall of the gym resembled something out of a museum.
“It looks like if you touch it, it might break,’’ said Matawan junior guard Jason Dunne.
Every time the Huskies seemed to push the boulder a little farther up the hill, it would tumble back down on top of them. Homegrown talent either never made it through the front door, or ran into some other type of complication.
Promising guard Jimbo Long, who had starred at the youth level, decided to go play for perennial state power St. Joseph-Metuchen instead of Matawan. He was a three-year starter at point guard for a team that won three Greater Middlesex Conference Tournament titles and two NJSIAA Non-Public A championships from 2011-13. The mother of another potential star, Brandyn Curry, moved her family from Matawan to North Carolina in 2005 after divorcing Curry’s father and meeting another man on Match.com. She eventually got remarried, and Curry went on to play at Harvard, where he is currently a senior guard for the Crimson averaging 9.5 points per game.
In 2011-2012, the Huskies appeared to be turning a corner after a promising 2010-11 season, but it all came apart in an instant. Senior forward Larry Alston, a football star who had averaged 13 points and 10 rebounds as a junior and was one of the Shore Conference’s top returning frontcourt players, decided not to play basketball to focus on his football career.
One of Matawan’s standout players last season, guard KaShaun Barnes, was dismissed from the team for a violation of school rules. He is now at Manchester, a team the Huskies could see in the upcoming Central Jersey Group II Tournament.
Those are just the prominent examples amidst multiple disciplinary and eligibility issues over the past few years.
“It just seemed like we never fully had a team,’’ Dunne said. “There was always someone having some problem to where we didn’t know who we would have out there half the time.”
“To think where we were seven years ago and to change that culture, it took a while,’’ Stead said. “Everything that was happening was compounded by losing and not having a whole lot of talent. Every time we took a step forward, we would get slapped in the face with something.”
However, while that 2011-12 season without Alston was not as successful as Stead had envisioned, it finally got the wheels turning toward Matawan’s eventual resurgence. Dunne and current junior Joe Piscopo saw extensive time as freshman guards, which translated into a major breakthrough last winter as sophomores.
The Huskies sent a shockwave through the Shore Conference as the No. 24 seed in the Shore Conference Tournament by stunning Christian Brothers Academy in the Round of 16 on the road thanks to a buzzer-beating jumper by Piscopo.
It marked the Huskies’ first win ever over the perennial Shore power and put them into the SCT quarterfinals for the first time in decades.
A year later, Matawan has taken it a step further. During the regular season, the Huskies won the Class B North title for their first division championship since 1965. Their home games are now only a morgue for visiting teams, with their raucous “Dawg Pound” student section turning the once-quiet gym into hostile territory for opponents. Even the old-timers from those teams in the 1960s have stopped by to see what all the buzz is about.
“At our first Shore Conference Tournament game this year against Point Boro, we had guys who played here years ago shaking my hand,’’ Piscopo said. “I was like, 'I've never seen you here before,' and they're like, 'You are bringing Matawan basketball back, and thank you so much for that.’”
On Sunday, the fourth-seeded Huskies beat fifth-seeded Manasquan 46-36 to put them one win away from their first SCT final appearance since 1964. As he stood in the hallway at Long Branch, Stead’s mind was already whirring ahead to figuring out a way to solve top-seeded Point Beach. The Huskies will face the tournament favorites, who have not lost to a Shore Conference team since falling to Lakewood in last year’s SCT final, at 6 p.m. on Wednesday at Brick Memorial in the SCT semifinals.
“I'm just so proud of these kids,’’ Stead said. “They just refuse to lose. Their whole demeanor is just to stay together.”
A lineup that seemed like a question mark on a nightly basis for years now has stability, as well as veteran leaders and players willing to perform their roles for the good of the team. Piscopo is an undersized guard and fiery presence who provides scoring and defense and backs down to no one. Dunne is a silky shooter and a primary ballhandler, and senior Chris Tawiah is another long-range shooter with quick hands on defense.
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Senior Nick Tomkins, a tight end/defensive end headed to Dartmouth to play football, is a defensive and rebounding force who sets jarring picks to free up the guards for open looks. Senior Austen Planes is a versatile player who does a little bit of everything from scoring to defense and has hit game-winning shots in the final seconds of multiple games this season. Senior Dritin Gyjrigi is another big body in the middle who contributes as a rebounder, defensive presence and screener on offense.
“They're so coachable, and they execute,’’ Stead said.
Having played together since they were seven or eight years old, the players all heard the lip service about forming a brotherhood with their teammates and having a tight bond away from the court. They didn’t realize how important that was until they had it. Their team chemistry is especially important now that they are in territory that no Matawan team has entered in half a century. They can't rely on experience in this spot, so they have to rely on each other.
“I’ll be honest, my freshman year on varsity, outside of practice and games, I wouldn’t even see those guys on the team,’’ Dunne said. “Now we all hang out together.”
“We can tell each other things straight up,’’ Piscopo said. “When you have that brotherhood where you can just talk straight up about things if something goes wrong, it makes you closer as a team.”
In Class B North this season, Matawan made the transition from the team always nipping at the heels of the division leaders to handling the pressure as the team being chased. It was an unfamiliar position, but one these players have been waiting their whole lives for.
“I thought they did a great job of being the hunted all year long and responding,’’ Stead said. “To be the hunted, it gives you thick skin.”
However, against heavy favorite Point Beach and its star-laden lineup, they will revert to the position they relish the most.
“That's how we like it,’’ Piscopo said. “We love to come out with the intensity of being the underdog.”
“Everybody seems to be satisfied with us being here, and we're not, so I think they're going to continue to have that same attitude,’’ Stead said.
In addition to Wednesday’s game, the Huskies are also the No. 1 seed in Central Jersey Group II, so the ride is far from ending. With Dunne, Piscopo and others returning next season, the ongoing renovation of Matawan basketball looks to continue. They have revamped their team, their crowd and their reputation as a contender in the Shore. Now about that banner…
“It’s got way too much dust on it,’’ Piscopo said. “We’ve got to update that thing.”
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