DeAngelo scores 23, Swarthmore one win away from Final Four
Just when it appeared Swarthmore College had met its match, coach Landry Kosmalski turned the tempo up to warp speed, and turned NCAA Division III tournament nemesis Keene State into roadkill.
Centennial Conference player of the year Vinny DeAngelo played like the Division III player of the year as he scored 17 of his 23 points in the first half to lift the Garnet, ranked seventh by D3hoops. com, to an 82-58 conquest of fifthranked Keene State, the same team that eliminated the Garnet on this same Tarble Pavilion floor in the first round of the 2022 tournament.
Big man Michael Caprise showed up with 18 points and 11 boards for Swarthmore (27-3) while limiting Jeff Hunter, the 6-foot-7 All-American, to just 12 points and six boards.
The Garnet need only defeat Nichols College here Saturday to earn their second trip to the D3 Final Four in three non-Covid seasons. If the Garnet are as successful running their tempo against the Bison (26-5), who might be a tick faster than the Owls, fans aren’t going to have time to get to the concession stand. The Bison have won 20 straight games.
“One of our core goals that Landry talks about before every game is to attack for 40 minutes,” said DeAngelo, who starred at Sun Valley High. “It’s what we do every game, every practice. When teams like to do that, we say, attack the attacker.”
The way the Swarthmore defense showed out, Nichols better bring its A-plus fastbreak game. The Garnet defense was tougher to solve than the barebones parking situation at Swat. In case you were wondering, parking tickets around here start at $20.
“Our guys came out really locked in, really ready to go,” Kosmalski said after praising Keene. “The whole week were kind of
ready to play and you saw that tonight. Total team effort.”
The clock struck midnight on the Owls (28-2) and their storybook season. They looked like a legit Final Four team the first four minutes as they worked the ball around and found the open man.
The rest of the way the Owls were like a comic division entrant in the Mummers Parade. After back-to-back possessions produced back-to-back airballs with nine minutes left in the second half, the game out control, the weary Owls called timeout. Must have been assigning aisle and window seats on the seven-hour drive back to New Hampshire.
DeAngelo scored eight points, including a couple of triples to spark the Garnet to a 20-13 lead. At that point the home team played with its two tallest players — Caprise and George Corzine. It was too much for the smaller Owls. Caprise got six points, all in the paint, Corzine a bucket.
When the Garnet lead grew to 24-13, Owls coach Ryan Cain called time. No matter. The Garnet forced the opponent that just set up a play into a shot-clock violation.
Meanwhile DeAngelo was on
fire, making four of his first six shots en route to 10 points and a 28-15 bulge for the Garnet.
For Swarthmore, it all comes down to Saturday, and what Kosmalski calls “The push.”
Kosmalski’s wife, upon hearing how fast the Owls were, asked her husband if the Garnet would slow the game down.
“I said, ‘no, we’re going to push,’” Kosmalski said. “She was like, ‘Why?’ I told her that’s just what we do.”
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In the other sectional at Swarthmore:
NICHOLS COLLEGE 86, STOCKTON STATE 68 » Grad student Matthew Alectus scored nine points, collected 15 rebounds and blocked four shots to lead his team to victory.
“We’ve got so many guys that are so dynamic in so many aspects it’s just hard to stop us all,” Alectus said. “Once we figured out how to use each other it just made us that more successful.”
It took a while for the Bison to warm up as their ride was stalled by a traffic issue, turning the fivehour trip from Dudley, Mass. into a seven-hour odyssey. Sixth man Jakigh Dotin scored 34 points off the bench for the Bison.