Hill repeats as Mercer champion
Postgrad 7-footer Maxwell named tournament MVP
POTTSTOWN » When fifth-year center Seth Maxwell started slow to open his post-grad season at The Hill School, Blues coach Phil Canosa didn’t panic.
When the box scores weren’t showing the numbers many expected from a player of Maxwell’s quality or size, for that matter — he stands at 7-feet tall — Canosa wasn’t overly concerned. He knew his center just needed to gain a little confidence and play a little looser than he had to start the season.
The 48th annual Mercer Invitational Tournament seemed to provide the perfect remedy for the early-season slump.
Maxwell capped off tournament Most Valuable Player honors with a 26-point effort, and The Hill School overcame a short-lived 35-34 deficit with 21-0 run to roll past Taft School (Watertown, Conn.) and win its second-straight Mercer Tournament title, 60-45 in Sunday’s final at The Hill School’s Gillison Gym.
“I think he has been adjusting from his previous high school. It’s finally just clicked for him now, I think,” Canosa said. “He came out and played really loose [in Saturday’s 80-73 semifinal win over Canterbury School (New Milford, Conn.)], and he did the same thing today.
“He was moving around better and anticipating better. When you play with confidence and without a conscience and just go out there and have fun, I think that has been it for him. He is just having fun now.”
The native of Coram, N.Y., who entered Sunday’s championship game coming off a 22-point effort in Saturday’s win over Canterbury, agreed.
“It feels really good. I was just trying to be a little more confident this weekend,” he said.
Chase Audige accompanied Maxwell’s 26-point showing with 10 points of his own, including six in the fourth quarter, while Caleb Dorsey added seven for the Blues.
Connor Prinz was the high scorer for Taft, finishing the game with 14 points, 12 of which game on four threepointers on the day, while Shamir Johnson hit three treys for the game to finish with nine points.
The Hill is off to an 8-3 start and impressively won their 23rd consecutive home game, a streak dating back to January 2016. It was Hill’s fifth time winning its host tournament in 48 years.
Taft kept things close early on and were down by just two at 18-16 to end the first quarter, thanks in part to a strong three-point shooting game that saw the Rhinos open the game with four straight treys to match the Blues’ inside game.
The Hill widened its margin to five points at 24-19 midway through the second quarter, but Taft answered with a 7-3 run to cut the gap to one, 27-26, before Maxwell hit three of four free throws and added a short jumper close out the half and give the Blues a 3226 lead.
But the Rhinos came out to start the second half with an offensive fury to saw them take a 35-34 lead with a 9-2 run, something Canosa wasn’t expecting.
“We didn’t execute our
game plan in the first two minutes of the third quarter,” he said. “We talked about what we wanted to do in the locker room at the half, and then we just went out there and didn’t do any of it.”
A 30-second timeout then followed Taft’s go-ahead bucket, which did more than just calm the Blues down and refocus, as The Hill went on a 21-0 run over the next sevenplus minutes, led by nine points from Maxwell and a basket and a pair of free throws from senior Chase Audige, to blow the game open at 55-35.
The Rhinos tried to make it interesting and answered with back-to-back threes to close the gap to 55-41, but that’s as close as they would get as the Blues held on for the win.
The tournament raises money for the Dick Ricketts Scholarship fund benefitting a deserving student-athlete from Pottstown High School looking to pursue a college education.
Named The Hill Invitational Tournament when it began, the event took on a new title in 1990 to honor the retirement Dave Mercer, Hill’s Director of Athletics from 1960-1990. The three-day tournament was created to connect Hill with the neighboring community of Pottstown.