Two outstanding seasons by Lehigh Valley basketball teams came to an end Tuesday night at Pleasant Valley and at least there wasn’t the heartache of losing at the buzzer or on some kind of controversial call or a player’s mistakes.
The Executive Education girls and Salisbury boys were overmatched in a PIAA second-round doubleheader.
Dunmore dominated the Raptors 58-20 in the Class 3A girls opener.
Meanwhile, Salisbury hung around for a half against Scranton Prep, but a 9-0 run by the District 2 champs to start the third quarter put the Falcons in a 20-point hole and ultimately, they fell 57-42.
The Executive girls finished their first season under former Bethlehem Catholic coach Jose Medina with an 18-8 record and the program’s first district title.
The Salisbury boys finished 24-5, giving veteran coach Jason Weaver, the most wins in his career and the program got its first state playoff win since 2001.
Dunmore domination
The Lady Bucks led 12-1 after the game’s first six minutes, 18-3 after one quarter and 39-6 at halftime and the mercy-rule went into effect for the second half.
Freshman Janessa Martin and senior Amanda Dempsey both scored 14 points. Leena Conte and Jackie Brown added seven apiece for Dunmore, which improved to 24-3 and will play Hughesville, the District 4 champion who beat Notre Dame-Green Pond 42-30 Tuesday night at Berwick.
“It’s hard to see players on film and know what they’re really like,” Dunmore coach Carrie Toomey said. “No. 1 for them [Mariah Hargrove] looked really good on film. So we really focused on her and wanted to take her out of her game. We played our best basketball today from the start and we haven’t been doing that from the start. We started off the game strong and gained more and more confidence.”
Toomey said her players made very good decisions.
“We talked about that because against Mount Carmel we didn’t,” Toomey said, even though Dumore prevailed 36-33 in the first-round game. “We broke that down a little bit and talked about what your options are when you’re being double-teamed and where to look. Leena Conte did a really good job of that tonight, but everybody did.”
Dunmore has an interesting makeup of its roster with several older players and a lot of freshmen.
“I have seven seniors and eight freshmen and in between, I only have one junior and three sophomores,” Toomey said. “But I really believe this team is getting it together.”
Asked if she thought her team could bring back the big prize from Hershey’s Giant Center on March 19 as they did in 2023, Toomey said, “Anything is possible.”
“If you believe and work hard and things have to fall right,” Toomey said. “We’ve been there before. Things have to go our way.”
Dempsey was a freshman on the 2023 state championship team and also believes three wins is very possible.
“I knew being a leader was going to be my main role on this team coming into the season, especially with all of the young talent we have,” she said. “At the beginning of the year, it was hard to mesh with two separate groups. But now that we’re into it, our leadership has been great. Jackie Brown and Leena Conte are two of our other seniors who have worked hard to lead by example and include everybody on our team. Now, we’re playing like one cohesive unit. We’re pretty well right now.”
Dunmore lost in the first round of the state playoffs in 2024 and in the second round last year, but Dempsey sees a team that wants to keep winning for three more games. She saw it three seasons ago and is seeing some similarities with this group.
“We’re motivated by our losses [including a 52-40 defeat to Easton on Jan. 24] and we want to keep pushing and take it all the way,” she said. “I think talent plays a big part in teams winning games, but at this point of the season we have so much heart and so much dedication and want-to. It’s going to be hard for teams to knock us off just because of how we want to win. We have the skill, but a lot of teams have the skill. We really want it.”
Medina, who led Bethlehem Catholic to state titles in 2017 and 2019, also wants to return to the biggest stage in Pennsylvania basketball.
But he also understands that he had a young team with just one senior this season, and several injuries didn’t help.
“I am very proud of our girls; it’s a very resilient group here,” Medina said. “We picked a bad day to have a bad day, but you’ve got to give Dunmore credit. That’s a great team and a great program and for us it was great to see that up close. For our girls, it plants a seed. It’s great when things are going wonderful, but you have ‘brought back to reality’ type games and we had one tonight. You need that sometimes, but I am proud of these girls and brought of their effort. They’re still champions and that’s something we’ll take into the offseason.”
Executive will graduate just one player and will have everyone else back next December when another season.
“We’ve got to get healthy because we had some injuries,” Medina said. “We’ll attack the offseason and ways we can grow stronger together as a unit. Tonight is what it looks That’s where we want to be. It’s great to be able to compete in the Lehigh Valley, but ultimately, our goal is to compete at this level. So, we’ll use tonight to better ourselves going forward.”
Medina said he has found a home at Executive.
“We’ve got great kids, a great community, a great staff and great support,” he said. “Bob Lysek [the school’s CEO] does a great job over there and our AD [Stephen Rivera] is wonderful. I am proud to be there, the kids are proud to be there and we’ll keep building.”
Dunmore 58, Executive 20
Executive 3 – 3 – 7 – 7 — 20
Dunmore 18 – 21 – 11 – 8 — 58
EXECUTIVE (20)
Hargrove 4 1-2 12, Rios 0 2-4 2, Bush 1 0-0 2, Rosa 0 0-0 0, Henry 1 0-0 2, Riddick 1 0-0 2, Green 1 0-0 2. Totals 7 3-6 20.
DUNMORE (58)
Janaya Martin 2 0-0 4, Janessa Martin 6 0-0 14, A. Dempsey 5 4-4 14, Conte 3 0-0 7, Nidoh 2 2-2 6, Brown 3 1-2 7, Walsh 0 2-2 2, Steeves 0 0-0 0, Brier 1 0-1 2, Mendola 0 2-2 2, King 0 0-0 0, McGowan 0 0-0 0, M. Dempsey 0 0-0 0, T. Walsh 0 0-0 0, R. Walsh 0 0-0 0. Totals 22 11-13 58.
3-pointers: Executive 3 (Hargrove 3); Dunmore 3 (Janessa Martin 2, Conte).
Scranton Prep-Salisbury boys story to come