Friends Academy Tops Southampton Boys Basketball To Win Class B Long Island Championship

The Southampton boys basketball team lost, 56-46, to Friends Academy in the Long Island Class B Championship at Centereach High School on March 9, ending the season a bit sooner than the Mariners would have liked.

A victory over Friends would have put Southampton a victory away from reaching next weekend’s New York State Final Four, but the Quakers were up to the task at hand, quick to answer anything the Mariners threw at them. Southampton head coach Herm Lamison said it was a good game overall by both teams, but felt as if his team missed multiple opportunities to take the game over and win.

“You can’t miss 13 free throws. If we make those, it’s a different game,” he said. “We had been shooting free throws, really pretty well, for the most part.

“They were a good team and you can’t make the kind of costly mistakes that we did against a team like that,” he added.

Friends was clinging to a 23-22 lead at halftime, but the tide of the game seemed to turn in Southampton’s favor when the Quakers’ big man, C.J. Williams, who is 6 feet, 8 inches tall and weighs 320 pounds or so, committed his fourth foul with about five minutes remaining in the third quarter. Additionally, another starter for Friends, Malachi Polson, committed his fourth foul just a few minutes later.

But the Quakers never really let the Mariners capitalize on those two starters missing from the game. Logan Mott drove to the basket and scored to give Friends a 35-25 lead in the third, and when Southampton responded with a little run of its own, Gabe Ferenez hit a three to push it back to a 10-point game.

Southampton junior Derek Reed drained a three that cut the Quakers’ lead to four, 46-42, with about three minutes remaining in the game, but that was as close as the Mariners would get. Ferenez scored to make it a 10-point game once again, and then with Southampton scurrying to try to cut into that deficit, Williams blocked an attempt by Reed, signaling the beginning of the end with just over a minute remaining.

Lamison and his players knew coming into the game that Williams was going to be a lot to handle. Despite being in foul trouble for a good portion of the game, Williams still played a vital role for the Quakers, scoring 14 points, blocking a few shots and just being an overall nuisance for the Mariners. Ferenez led Friends with 15 points, while Mott finished with 10.

“I thought our guys were more than capable of handling him, but he is twice the weight of any one of my players,” Lamison said of Williams. “Our kids are relatively thin, have more athletic builds, and so covering that type of load is tough for anybody.

“We wanted to try and front him as best we can,” Lamison explained as to the game plan surrounding Williams. “But he was so wide it was really hard to get around him. With Ryan [Smith] being as thin as a rail, you had two total opposites there, and trying to guard him, Ryan was just overpowered by him. He was a mountain of a kid and it was just one of those things you had to deal with. We wanted to bring him away from the basket, but that didn’t work out as well as we would have liked.”

LeBron Napier scored a game-high 17 points in what was his final game of his high school career, having just eclipsed the 1,000 career-point milestone in the Mariners’ previous game. Reed scored 14 points, and Smith, who was in foul trouble for much of the night, finished with seven points.

Napier leads what is a very strong senior class set to graduate this June. He, along with Smith and Andrew Venesina, were each starters and co-captains this season, while Seven Smith and Saintino Arnold were key players off the bench. Kellen Jefferies is also graduating.

“It’s always disappointing to me as a coach to lose, especially when you get to that point of the season and there’s only a few teams playing and you’re one of them,” Lamison explained. “I feel bad for the kids, like LeBron, Ryan and Andrew, because it was their last run, they don’t get another opportunity. We have a lot of underclassmen and are a young team, for the most part. I feel bad for those guys but also feel great for them in another sense because they probably were not expected, in some people’s eyes, to do as well as they did and accomplish what they did, being undefeated in league, make a deep run in the county tournament and coming close to reaching our ultimate goal. But the bottom line is we came out with a loss and it’s disappointing and disheartening for the kids.”

Lamison continued to praise his seniors for all that they’ve been through, including the pandemic that basically took an entire season away from them.

“LeBron, Ryan, Andrew, Seven, Saintino, Kellen, they’re an interesting group because of the tremendous amount of adversity that they had. COVID basically affected two and a half years of their high school lives, like it did with everybody else, but kids analyze things differently. They lost those years together and they’re never going to get them back.

“But this group in particular, I remember them coming up through junior high,” he continued. “I watched them grow together as teammates, as classmates, and I always thought that there was always going to be an opportunity for this group to go far and do something, I knew there was something special with this group. They really played well together and genuinely cared for each other. I always anticipated doing something very special with this group, and that’s not to say that we didn’t and not to discount what they did accomplish. We did the best we could.”

Southampton, though, is more of the program to reload than to rebuild, and even with six seniors departing, the future still remains bright. If Napier was Southampton’s top player this season, Reed was 1A and will certainly be taking over that top role next season. Naevon Jenkins had a very good first year on varsity as a freshman and will likely form the Mariners’ new duo along with Reed. But there are also others who showed signs of being solid varsity players, such as sophomore Tyler Blake, who played very well against Friends in Ryan Smith’s absence when was in foul trouble. That also includes a strong group of players who will be moving up from junior varsity.

Lamison is excited for the future of his program and really likes the way each grade will even out going forward. The team will only have three seniors next year, and barring any changes, two the following year, which means there won’t be an exodus of players leaving year after year, which, in turn, should lead consistency and stability to the program, much like when the Mariners won their multiple consecutive county and Long Island titles not long ago.

“It worked out really well back then and I’m hoping for that same type of success going forward,” he said.