After Winter Storm Jonas kept the Sidwell Friends and Maret boys' basketball teams away from games for eight and 10 days, respectively, and allowed each only a pair of practices, the Mid-Atlantic Athletic Athletic Conference rivals came out firing on Friday night. They brawled for four quarters plus an extra session, trading the lead eight times in the final 12 minutes in front of a packed gym at Maret in Northwest Washington.
Sidwell junior guard Jelani Williams scored five of his game-high 26 points in overtime and willed the Quakers to a 78-71 win. Neither team had led by more than five points in regulation.
“We’ve had a lot of games in the last few years where the games got tough and tight and we fell away a little bit,” Williams said. “This was a great fight for our guys.”
With 15 seconds left in regulation and Sidwell Friends (12-5, 4-2 MAC) down one, Williams dribbled the length of the floor, pumped under the rim, drew contact and scored for the lead. He missed the free throw, though, and Sidwell’s lead sat at one.
Then it was Maret junior Coby Davis's turn. Davis, who led the Frogs (12-6, 4-1) with 17 points, showed some post moves of his own and earned a trip to the free throw line with 1.1 seconds left. The first was short. The second was good.
As Saddiq Bey's three-quarter-court heave clanked off the rim at the buzzer for Sidwell, the game headed to overtime tied at 67.
“When you’re playing a tough game like this, you want to be able to win it,” Sidwell Coach Eric Singletary said. “Both teams left so much out there that when you win, you don’t think about how tired, how beat up you really are.”
Maret scored first in the overtime period but managed only four total points in the five minutes.
Williams scored five consecutive points in the extra frame to give Sidwell a lead it did not relinquish, but it was junior Ross Young's three-point play that sealed his school's first win over the Frogs since Jan. 31, 2012.
“This is something that I’ll definitely remember,” Young said. “This is a great win, but we can’t enjoy it too long . . . because we might have to play them again soon.”
Young finished with 13 points but did some of his best work by limiting Maret's top prospect, 6-foot-11 Luka Garza, under the basket.
“I knew that he was a really good finisher,” Young said. “I think the key to stopping him was keeping energy, always staying next to him and trying to get in his head.”
Garza still managed 13 points — including a deep corner two-pointer in the third quarter that he followed with an air kiss toward Sidwell’s raucous student section.
But Maret’s second-chance opportunities were far less frequent than when the Frogs managed a 56-54 win in their meeting earlier this month.
“This guy right next to me,” Williams said of Young, “he played a hell of game. Big-time rebounds. Big-time finishes. Big-time player.”
