Aliquippa wins with punishing defense
Quips clamp down on Steel Valley star Polak
Aliquippa is known for its punishing, intimidating defense on the football field, but it doesn’t stop there.
As Steel Valley and star senior Cam Polak found out in a WPIAL Class 3A first-round playoff matchup Friday night at West Allegheny, the Quips take just as much pride in their defense on the basketball court.
“We don’t like getting scored on,” Aliquippa senior forward Michael Dawkins said. “We don’t care who you are. We’re going to bring it to you.”
Aliquippa held the Ironmen without a made field goal in the first quarter and kept them to only 14 points in the first half. The Quips used constant double teams to frustrate Polak, who finished out the regular season as the secondleading scorer in the WPIAL with an average of 31.3 points per game.
Polak fouled out of the game with Steel Valley trailing by 10 in the third quarter, and Aliquippa held off a late rally by the Ironmen to win, 53-46.
“We had to take the ball out of [Polak’s] hands to disrupt what they wanted to do offensively,” Quips coach Dwight Hines said. “We knew that everything revolved around him. We did a lot of studying.”
Polak scored nine points in the first half but made only one field goal on 1 of 6 shooting.
He started heating up in the second half before fouling out of the game midway through the third quarter, finishing with 16 points in the defeat.
“We had a couple of dudes who wanted to watch him,” Aliquippa big man Zuriah Fisher said. “We had to play physical, though.”
Fisher — a Penn State football recruit and one of the top high school linebackers in the country — used his powerful 6foot-3, 255-pound frame to dominate in the low post on his way to 18 points, while Dawkins contributed 13 in the win.
“Me and [Fisher], we compete every day at practice,” Dawkins said. “We get each other better, and it just goes into the games. It’s just natural for us. It’s second nature.”
From the opening tip, the Quips set a physical tone for the game by hounding Polak every time he touched the ball and forcing Steel Valley into several turnovers. Aliquippa struggled to get their shots to fall, but their defense sparked them to a 9-4 lead after the first quarter.
The Quips put together a 13-2 run to start the second quarter and seemed on its way to a blowout win, but the Ironmen wouldn’t go away quietly.
Although Polak only made one basket in the first half, he drained a pair of 3pointers early in the third quarter to cut the deficit to 10.
Just when it seemed like Steel Valley had momentum on its side, though, Polak got called for back-to-back offensive fouls, ending his night with 3:15 left in the third quarter.
After stretching its lead to 16 early in the fourth quarter, Aliquippa appeared to take its foot off the gas a bit, allowing the Ironmen to slowly climb back into the game.
Steel Valley made it a six-point game with less than a minute left and had the ball with a chance to make it a one-possession game, but a turnover doomed the Ironmen’s chances of an improbable comeback.
“They almost came back, but I always knew we were going to win,” Fisher said.
With the win, the No. 5-seeded Quips advance to take on No. 4 seed Seton LaSalle in the WPIAL quarterfinals on Thursday.
“We’re the underdog against every team we play,” Dawkins said. “Everybody’s against us. We’re used to it. That’s just how it is.
“We like being the underdog. We like proving people wrong.”