Brother Rice ends 40-year drought between regional titles
Warriors top Chippewa Valley, 76-44
Somebody was going to win their first regional boys basketball title since the Cold War still raged, Yuppies were a thing, and “The Simpsons” hadn’t yet hit the airwaves.
The other team was going to go back home, and stare up at a dusty, infrequently modified banner in its home gym.
And after getting knocked out of districts as the No. 1 team in the state a year ago, there was no way that the Bloomfield Hills Brother Rice Warriors were going to let that latter team be them.
They led wire-to-wire in Thursday’s Division 1 regional championship game at Troy High School, beating Chippewa Valley, 76-44, to claim their school’s first regional title since 1984, when BJ Armstrong was a member of the squad.
The magnitude of ending a 40-year drought hadn’t quite registered with Rice’s Warren Marshall IV in the immediate aftermath.
“Not yet. It will probably kick in, in a little bit, but I think it was kind of an emotional moment. Coach (Leon) McDonald (a 1999 Rice grad), the last time we made it to a regional championship was 26 years ago when he was a junior. So when he said that we’re like, ‘We gotta end this,’” Marshall said of the assistant, who’s been on the Rice staff for 14 years, and was sent out to collect the trophy by head coach Rick Palmer. “And plus we had like half our school there. So it really meant a lot.”
The regional drought has lasted almost as long for Chippewa Valley, which hasn’t hoisted a trophy in this round since 1987. It meant something for the Big Reds (16-10) to have there Thursday night, too, with a crack at ending their own drought.
“That’s what I told them, I said, you know, rough math in my head, there was probably like 160 Division 1 teams. And 144 of them would love to be where we are today,” Big Reds coach Corey Smith said. “You know, it didn’t end is we we had hoped, but I knew how good that team was.”
The Warriors (20-6) entered the postseason as an honorable mention in the final Associated Press statewide rankings, after having finished tied for second in the Catholic League’s Central Division, and finishing runner-up to top-ranked Orchard Lake St. Mary’s in the CHSL tournament title game, with half of their losses coming against the Eaglets.
Rice wasted no time in jumping on top of the Big Reds, though, scoring the game’s first six points, then pushing the lead to double digits at 13-2.
The lead was 17-4 after one quarter, 38-16 at the half, and 58-28 entering the fourth.
The Big Reds were hoping to keep it a low-scoring affair, like the one they’d won on Tuesday to get here, beating L’Anse Creuse North, 49-43.
“Certainly I knew we had a chance, if we got it close — you know that the underdog always has little advantage if it’s close at the end of the game. You know, and that was our goal to keep the game close. We we’ve never been a high octane scoring team,” Smith said. “Like I told them, if they get to 60, we lost the game. So we were trying to keep it, you know, somewhere around 50. And they today, they were just way too good for it.”
Marshall scored six of his 15 points in the first quarter, then Elijah Williams took over after that, finishing with 22, while Luke Salkowski added another 15 in the paint.
Caleb Fowlkes had 10 points off the bench to lead the Big Reds, while Jordan Wright had eight.
“They’re a better version of us. And that was our detriment. You know, we’ve been able to speed teams up, run them off what they are able to do, and just at every position, they were a little taller, a little more athletic than our guys and that’s, you know, they were able to do to us what we were able to do to most teams this year,” Smith said.
The Warriors will get another crack at the Eaglets (24-1), who beat Grand Blanc, 65-40, in the regional final at Milford on Thursday. That lines the two Catholic League rivals up for a rematch in the quarterfinals next Tuesday, back down at University of Detroit Mercy’s Calihan Hall.
“We’re happy, but we still think there’s bigger prizes ahead for us,” Palmer said. “We’ve been practicing really good and our focus levels were really good. I talk about this all the time — it’s not a team I worry about looking ahead. When we lost four in a row and when we won eight in a row, they kind of just kept doing things practicing the right way and getting better. So this team is really emotionally stable. And so they don’t get — they’re excited but they don’t get too excited. … We’re gonna enjoy this one. We wanted to earn the right to play them (the Eaglets) for the fourth time and take our take one more shot at ‘em.”
It was St. Mary’s that ended the run for then-No. 1 Rice in last year’s district finals, making this year’s run all the sweeter.
“Listen, that team (last year) that didn’t get to do it set the set the tone for our culture, they put our program on the map. Without them, this probably isn’t possible, but this group, like stepped our culture up in some ways, you know, they kind of laid the groundwork and they kind of put some finishing details on the house,” Palmer said. “So I’m really happy for these guys.