Detroit — This might be the only time in the history of Birmingham Brother Rice’s storied athletic program that a loss to archival Detroit Catholic Central was ultimately the best thing possible.
Back on Feb. 10, Brother Rice suffered a tough three-point loss to Catholic Central, which eliminated it from the Catholic League boys basketball tournament and all of a sudden created a big gap in the schedule until the start of the state tournament.
As it turns out, it was a perfect reset for Brother Rice.
“You know, my good friend Gjon Djokaj (former Warren De La Salle coach and current Wayne State assistant) said, ‘Hey man, when you lose in the Catholic League tournament earlier than you want, sometimes it’s a blessing,’” Brother Rice head coach Rick Palmer said. “He won a state title and had two Breslin trips (at De La Salle), and lost earlier in the tournament both times. You can kind of reset. You get out of the spotlight a little bit. Everybody stops talking and the pressure comes off a little bit.”
Brother Rice has certainly played like a different team since, and it is now going somewhere it hasn’t in 42 years.
For the first time since 1984, Brother Rice is going to the state’s final four after a dominant 88-59 win over Wayne Memorial in a Division 1 quarterfinal at Calihan Hall.
Brother Rice advanced to meet East Lansing or Ann Arbor Pioneer in a semifinal at 2 p.m. Friday.
Against Wayne Memorial, Brother Rice played about as well offensively as a high school team can play.
Brother Rice scored 25 points in the first quarter on 11-of-14 shooting, held a 48-28 lead at halftime on 19 of 30 shooting and kept pouring it on the fourth quarter behind a balance and relentless offensive attack.
Senior Greg Grays and freshman Jordan McDaniel each scored 22 points, and senior Ivan Stojanovski added 17 points for Brother Rice (21-5).
Senior Cyrus Goins scored 20 points and Mr. Basketball finalist Jaylohn Allen added 19 points for Wayne Memorial, last season’s runner-up with finished 23-4.
No doubt, all the success for the Brother Rice the few three weeks was forged during that time off after the Catholic Central loss.
“We’ve shortened practices,” Palmer said. “We’ve only gone about an hour a day.”
Not only did it allow Brother Rice to rest some slightly injured bodies, but it was a wake-up call to have better practices in a shorter time and hold each other more accountable.
“That was really the wake-up call,” Grays said. “We knew that if we wanted to win, we had to change something. We had to change our mindset. Practices starting getting tougher. We starting holding each other accountable, not just the coaches holding us accountable.”
Brother Rice senior forward Trevor Smith echoed those sentiments that a mentality change was needed, but also it allowed the team to come closer together.
“It was just mostly us starting to bond together,” he’ said. “Everybody was talking the whole season about how we didn’t like each other, we always be fighting and we always be doing this and that. Now, we’re not the same team. We’re gelling, we’re coming together at the right time.”
As a result, the Brother Rice team and community will make plans for East Lansing Friday and experience something they haven’t since the year the Tigers last won the World Series.
Given the way Brother Rice is playing, it plans on doing more than just showing up and experiencing what the Final Four is like.
“The pressure is off, and now we get to go do something nobody thinks we can do,” Palmer said.
Roseville vs. Avondale state quarterfinal
Detroit — Score one for experience over youth.
Tuesday’s Division 1 boys basketball quarterfinal matchup was an intriguing case of whether a senior-laden Auburn Hills Avondale roster that’s played together for years would prevail, or a talented but youthful Roseville squad with a large core of non-seniors playing oblivious to any pressure.
Not surprisingly, Avondale’s chemistry and veteran savvy was too much, as it advanced to the state semifinals with a 71-50 win over Roseville at Calihan Hall.
Avondale (26-1) advanced to play Rockford in a noon semifinal on Friday at Michigan State University’s Breslin Center.
“We’ve been putting in the work for three years,” Avondale head coach Aaron Fox said. “Just our experience from last season, losing (in districts), we’ve been working all offseason. We’ve scheduled a tough schedule to prepare us for this moment. We knew we were battle-tested. We had to be the more disciplined team. We’re both athletic and we both like to get up and down. It’s about who’s going to be more disciplined.”
It is Avondale’s first appearance at the state’s final four since winning the Class B championship in 2002.
Senior Ja’Kobe Liford scored 21 points, senior Jaidon Bourgeois had 17 points, and senior Noah Bonds and sophomore Da’Kari Fields each had 12 points to lead Avondale.
“They’re a young team, but still a good team,” Liford said. “They fought hard. But we’re just some dogs. We’re going to bring that mentality every single game.”
Sophomore Carter George and junior Terrell Owens each scored 12 points to lead Roseville (19-7), which won its first regional title since 1957 last week and has a bright future,
“I don’t believe in age or youth,” first-year Roseville head coach Rashad Porter said. “I just think as a coach, I can develop them a little more to be ready. So I don’t want to put it on them that they were younger. I put it on, I can do a better job of getting them ready. So I’ll get them ready and I got so much returning and now that they have played in this big game, now they understand.”
The biggest spurt for Roseville came to start the second quarter, when it went on a 14-2 surge to take a 23-21 lead just over two minutes into the second.
Other than that, Avondale was in control throughout.
Avondale held a 29-25 lead at halftime, and then built a 39-28 lead with 4:10 remaining in the third quarter on a basket by Lifford.
Each time from there Roseville tried to press and get back in it, Avondale would have an answer.
Avondale took a 60-46 lead with 3:56 remaining in the game, and finished Roseville off with an 11-2 spurt to go up 71-48 with 1:03 left, capped by emphatic breakaway dunk by Bonds to sew up its first trip to East Lansing in 24 years.
“We’ve known about the state championship (in 2002),” Fox said. “That’s been kind of fueling us. A lot of stuff is happening now is very similar to how it happened in 2002. There was a lot upsets in our path, but we took advantage and made it.”
Keith Dunlap is a freelance writer.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Brother Rice, Avondale advance to state semifinals with big wins
Reporting by Keith Dunlap, Special to The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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