If you plan on watching the District 11 Class AA girls’ basketball playoffs during the next two weeks, strap in. Excitement abounds from top to bottom of the eight-team field.
No. 1 North Schuylkill is 22-2 and coming off the Schuylkill League championship.
No. 8 Pine Grove, although 11-11, is District 11 royalty. The Cardinals have 19 district titles in the last 36 years, 16 coming in Class AA.
Youthful reigning champion No. 3 Minersville — also 22-2 — is positioned in a rematch of last year’s Schuylkill League title with No. 6 Marian (17-7), a team that has shown tremendous resiliency in the face of injury-plagued adversity.
And those are just the names we all know well.
Schuylkill League teams create the chocolate cookie exterior of the Class AA tournament, while the Colonial League serves as the double-stuffed vanilla icing in the middle of this delicious bracket.
No. 4 Palmerton (20-4) plays No. 5 Salisbury (16-7) for the right to meet the North Schuylkill-Pine Grove winner. Colonial champ No. 2 Notre Dame-Green Pond (21-3) plays No. 7 Palisades (13-9) in the other quarterfinal.
It’s easy to see this is going to be a fun bracket for fans to watch, but a very difficult one to navigate for coaches and their teams.
“It’s probably the deepest (field) that’s been around in a long, long time,” Minersville head coach Jared Homa said. “ ... There’s not an easy game for any of us, one through eight, to start off.”
Minersville kicks off a tripleheader tonight at Martz Hall with its 5 p.m. meeting with Marian. The Battlin’ Miners have won the last three meetings against the Fillies, including the 2014 Schuylkill League championship game.
This time around, things are slightly different for Minersville, which is coming off a 49-41 loss to North Schuylkill in the league final. Still, Homa isn’t worried about a lack of confidence.
“That’s the good part about a young group, they get it out of their mind quick,” he said. “It’s one of those concerns you have, but we had practice immediately and it was like going back to the first day of practice — upbeat. For being young, our group is very mature.”
Marian, too, is in somewhat unfamiliar territory. The Fillies bumped up to Class AA after capturing the District 11 Class A championship last season.
The team has had successful stints playing up a class. Three of Marian’s nine district titles since 1978 have come in Class AA (1979, ’80 and ’86). However, the majority of the Fillies’ recent successes have come in Class A.
North Schuylkill also knows a thing or two about jumping from classification to classification. The Spartans won five Class AAA titles from 1986-97 and three Class AA crowns from 2004-07.
Dropping down from a stacked Class AAA field with state-ranked powerhouses Bethlehem Catholic and Allentown Central Catholic is a big help to North Schuylkill.
“It’s definitely a different feeling and it’s nice to potentially have games close to home,” North Schuylkill coach John Rizzo said. “Last couple years, we’ve been making preparations to head down to the Lehigh Valley and play teams like ACC, Beca and Southern Lehigh.
“This year, it’s nice to prepare to go back to a court that we feel like we just got off of.”
The Spartans will have that feeling tonight, playing the second game of the Martz Hall tripleheader just a week after winning the Schuylkill League title on the Mecca floor (the third game tonight features the Tamaqua and North Schuylkill boys).
But Rizzo also knows Class AA won’t be a cake-walk. His Spartans first have to go through divisional foe Pine Grove, one of the district’s most decorated schools.
The Cardinals have shown their own form of resiliency this season, starting 2-8 overall and missing recently-graduated star guard Becky Evans. The young squad turned the season around and finished 9-3 in its final 12 games.
“I think, all along, our schedule was tough early and the hope was we’d make a late run,” Pine Grove coach Chris George said. “... Our goal was to get into the playoffs all along. Obviously having so many young players new to the mix was a challenge for us and that took time.”
While the immediate attention of local fans will be on Schuylkill League teams, the Colonial League nugget of the Class AA bracket should also garner attention.
Notre Dame-Green Pond has had an excellent season, winning its two Colonial League playoff games by at least 15 points over Palmerton (60-44) and Northwestern Lehigh (51-36).
Palmerton boasts one of the league’s best scorers in Jade Farquhar, who averages nearly 18 points per game.
Salisbury has five of its seven top scorers back from last season’s state-qualifying team, including 6-foot-3 All-State center Meagan Eripret and guard Kelly Gonoude.
“This is my fifth year being in the district playoffs in Class AA and it’s easily the deepest and most talented field that I’ve seen so far,” George said. “And it looks like it’s probably going to be like that for the next couple years.”
(Wilson is girls’ hoops beat writer for The Republican-Herald. Contact him at mwilson@republicanherald.com or on Twitter @MWilsonRH)