The Division II girls’ basketball championship that Bishop Brady won on Sunday, the first one in school history, was a family affair.
There were the Rivera sisters – senior leader Ami coming through with nine of the Giants 12 fourth-quarter points, and junior Isabella coming up with the steal and game-winning layup in the last seconds of Brady’s 52-50 win against Kennett (15-3) at Bedford High School.
There’s the Brady field hockey family that one that won the last two D-III titles and shares three starters with the basketball team – Libbey Hicks, Halle Laramie and Riley Marsh. The 2019 field hockey title was also the first in Brady history, was also won at Bedford High and shared the same high scorer, Hicks, who had 22 points against Kennett and scored the only goal in Brady’s 1-0 win in the 2019 field hockey final.
“We were talking about that, actually, when we found out that we were going to be playing at Bedford High School,” Hicks said. “We were like, ‘How cool would that be to go back and win another one there?’ And then we went out and we did it.”
The Brady field hockey coach, Kelly Owen, was at the basketball game on Sunday. She was sitting with Annie (Alosa) Mattarazzo, who is part of the first family of Brady hoops. Mattarazzo coached the girls’ basketball team from 2016-2020. She stepped down from those positions last spring, along with her assistants Sal Alosa, her father, and Andrew Mattarazzo, her husband. But the coronavirus pandemic changed the 2020-21 plans for those assistants, so Alosa took over as head coach this season, Andrew Mattarazzo stayed on as an assistant and Kelly Alosa, Annie’s mother and Sal’s wife, kept the book.
“This isn’t about me, this is about them,” Sal said after the game, gesturing to his players celebrating with the championship trophy. “I just walk up and down the sideline.”
Alosa does empower his players to make their own decisions on the court, but the Giants almost got tripped up on that long leash in the final. As usual, Brady (16-2) was playing fast, jacking up 3s and going for steals, but none of it was working and the Eagles had a 16-4 lead with 1:31 left in the first quarter. It looked like the beginning of a long night for the Giants, but they had something else in mind.
A 3-pointer from Laramie and a drive from Hicks cut the lead to 16-9 by the end of the first. Kennett owned the glass in the first quarter with a 16-5 rebounding advantage, and Brady shot just 1-for-10 from 3-point land in those opening eight minutes. But the Giants would turn it around after that, going 7-for-26 from 3 after the first quarter and being dead even in rebounds, 32-32, over the last three quarters.
That effort on the glass was part of Brady’s increased defensive intensity, which may have been the biggest factor in the turnaround.
“We just knew that if we didn’t crack down on defense this game was going to be a lot different than how it is right now,” Ami Rivera said with the championship medal hanging around her neck.
The smaller Giants were swarming Kennett players any time they got the ball inside, and they were using every inch of size and ounce of muscle they had to keep the Eagles off the glass. Brady was playing in a ferocious frenzy, which was nothing new.
“I call them piranhas because they like to play defense,” Alosa said. “Once they know they can beat you, they want to take the ball away. Libbey Hicks, Isabella Rivera, Ami, if they know they’ve got you, they’re going to come get it.”
Not only did Hicks finish with a game-high 22 points, she also took on the challenge of guarding Kennett’s best player, senior guard Maddie Stewart. She had eight points in the first quarter, but Hicks held her to three in the second quarter and 18 for the game. On the other end, Hicks hit two 3-pointers, Marsh hit one of her own and when Ami Rivera (16 points) converted a sweet Eurostep, fast break layup in the final seconds of the first half, Brady had its first lead of the game, 25-24.
The two teams traded buckets throughout the second half, they just went about it in different ways. The Eagles spread it around with six of them contributing one bucket each in the third quarter, and four of them scoring in the fourth. The Giants went with the hot hand – Hicks scored 11 of the team’s 15 third-quarter points and Ami Rivera scored nine of the 12 fourth-quarter points, although the biggest hoop of the fourth belonged to her sister.
Kennett took a 50-48 lead with 2:41 left on a 3 from Stewart. The scored stayed there until Ami Rivera connected on a drive to tie things up with :22 left on the clock. After missed opportunities for both teams, Kennett was inbounding the ball under the Brady basket with :12.1 left. As the Eagles got the ball near midcourt, the ball popped free and suddenly the championship was lying in the court waiting for someone to grab it.
“Ami got (Sydnie Chin) off balance, (Chin) lost the ball, I got the ball and I just made the layup,” Isabella Rivera said. “It was left-handed, so it was like, ‘Don’t miss,’ but it was just like every other layup and everything else we’ve been practicing all these years.”
The Eagles had used up all their timeouts trying to cope with Brady’s piranha defense, so they had to immediately inbound the ball after Rivera’s layup. They got it into Stewart’s hands, but her short jumper didn’t beat the buzzer and it was off mark. So, after losing in the semifinals last year and in 2018, the Brady basketball families had the championship they’d been chasing.
“We made it here after all these years, we were meant to be here,” Ami Rivera said. “It feels amazing.”