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Sports

Wall High School Basketball Teams Head Into State Playoffs

Boys team looks to move out of the shadows while girls team hopes to return to contention

For one of Wall’s basketball teams, a victory in the state playoffs would be the latest step in an ongoing building process for a program that has been mired in obscurity, while for the other, a win may signal the beginning of a return to perennial contention.

The Wall boys basketball team is looking at Tuesday’s NJSIAA Central Jersey Group III playoffs as a chance to crack double digit wins while picking up the program’s first postseason victory in recent memory.

On the girls side, the Crimson Knights look to continue to show improvement with a young team that hopes to one day reach the heights its head coach once enjoyed as a player at Wall in the early 2000s.

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The boys team on Tuesday will travel to seventh-seeded Freehold Boro for a first-round game at 5:30 p.m. in a bid to add to a season in which they have shown improvement on the court and in the win column. If they can pull out a victory, they will most likely face second-seeded Neptune in the quarterfinals on March 3.

“I think the first step was for us to get there, which we haven’t done in at least the past five or six years,’’ said head coach Michael Puorro. “Basketball has been so irrelevant at Wall that every time you win a big game, you’re doing something that hasn’t been done in a while.’’

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Led by senior guard Kyle Janeczek, who is one of the top 10 scorers in the Shore Conference at 19 points per game, along with senior center Brandon Walsh, the 10th-seeded Crimson Knights will be facing a Freehold team that they did not play during the regular season but are familiar with.

Wall and Freehold were both in the Shore Conference Class B North division last season before Wall was moved to Class C Central under the latest realignment before this season.

“They're very athletic and well-coached,’’  Puorro said. “They use their athleticism to their advantage, and at times athletic teams give us a little bit of a problem. The last two weeks, we’ve picked up athletic teams that would give us match-up problems like Freehold in order to give us a chance to be more prepared for a team like that.’’

Freehold essentially had to change its team on the fly during the regular season because senior Sterry Codrington and guard Jazzmar Clax, a pair of quick guards and football standouts, quit the team. Junior guard Brandon Reynolds, the team’s second-leading scorer at the time, was dismissed for disciplinary reasons.

That meant a heavy reliance on senior guards Jesse Hunt and Derrick Bender and junior 3-point sniper Pat Mullin, but Puorro knows that the Colonials are still a dangerous team despite the turmoil they have endured. Wall, meanwhile, is looking to regain the form it had during a 5-0 start before sputtering to win only four games since.

“We were clicking on all cylinders and playing team basketball at the beginning,’’ Puorro said. “The effort was at a high level no matter who the opponent was. I think the beginning got to our head a little bit and all the attention given to the kids that they never got in regards to basketball might have gone to their head in a bad way. We’ve matured from our mistakes and a rough January, and we have to get back to what we were doing and rekindle things.’’

On the girls side, the Crimson Knights enter as the 11th seed and will go on the road to take on sixth-seeded Hamilton West at 4 p.m. on March 1 in the Central Jersey Group III first round.

After graduating the school’s all-time leading scorer, Kathryn Campbell, Wall has made a steady improvement with a young team led by senior guard Jess Nevins. She recently went over the 1,000-point mark with a 29-point effort in a win over Toms River South on Valentine’s Day and looks to extend her career for a few more games if possible.

Considering Hamilton is currently 11-12, this is a winnable game for Wall if it can find a way to slow down Hamilton star Alexis Johnson, a junior guard who is one of the most explosive scorers in the state.

She already has a 41-point game to her credit this season and is already over 1,000 points as a junior, so Wall will have to find a way to slow her down if it hopes to advance to meet the winner of third-seeded Holmdel and 14th-seeded Princeton in the quarterfinals on March 3.

Wall, which is currently 10-13, will counter with Nevins and sophomore guard Kelsey Thompson, who are both good 3-point shooters. The hope is that the Crimson Knights can get a win to build their confidence going forward with a young team that also plays freshmen and return to the type of program they were when head coach Colleen Kilmurray was a player there in the early 2000s.

Wall was a perennial CJ III contender at that time and made a deep run in 2004.

“To get a playoff win would be great, and it would show that we are really building something here,’’ Nevins said. “We’ll take our chances and see what happens.’’ 

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