Jan 16, 2018 4 min read

McDONALD – At halftime of the junior varsity game, Cam Hanley went into the locker room to begin getting dressed.

There was only one thing missing for the Chartiers-Houston High School standout basketball player: the correct uniform.

“My dad normally packs my stuff,” Hanley explained. “When I came in to look through my bag, I only had my home uniform. I called him to go get the right one but he was already here, so I just asked someone from the JV team for theirs when the time came.”

Hanley didn’t want to be caught wearing the home whites Tuesday night because animosity is alive and well between section rivals Chartiers-Houston and Fort Cherry, especially after last year’s two buzzer-beating wins by the Bucs.

“A lot of it started last year when we lost both games with last-second buzzer-beaters,” said Fort Cherry coach Dwayne Canton. “The kids had a mindset, even bringing in an article and setting it on the floor before they went out, that (Chartiers-Houston) would get no more Ws. It was going to be chippy. I knew it was going to be.”

Even with pushing and shoving during play and after whistles, Hanley sliced through the Fort Cherry defense in his unusual No. 44 uniform to score 30 points and lead Chartiers-Houston to a 60-51 victory in a battle for first place in Section 2-AA.

“We wanted to make a statement,” Hanley said. “Since we lost AJ (Myers), (Fort Cherry) figured they could just run through us. We wanted to prove a point. This was very big, especially for us.”

The distaste for one another climaxed with 1:27 left in the fourth quarter after a 14-5 run by Chartiers-Houston (4-0, 9-2) ended with Hanley and Fort Cherry’s Ryhan Culberson each being assessed a technical after a scuffle at midcourt.

The technical was the fifth personal foul for Culberson.

Hanley took an inbounds pass with 1.5 seconds remaining and banked home a three-pointer from just inside the midcourt line as the first-half buzzer sounded to cut Fort Cherry’s lead to 26-24.

“It begins and ends with him because offensively he breaks down the defense and gives everyone else opportunities,” Chartiers-Houston coach Eugene Briggs said about Hanley. “It’s very difficult to stop him with one guy. A guy that size, the way he gets up on the glass (for rebounds), what doesn’t he do well?”

The Bucs outscored Fort Cherry (5-1, 7-6) in the third quarter, 20-11. They pulled away by scoring 14 straight points over the final 30 seconds of the third and first five minutes of the fourth quarter.

“That junk defense,” Canton said. “They played a box-and-one with a 1-3-1 and every time we tried to go to Culberson they were triple-teaming him. The big thing was getting some other guys to step up, but nothing was falling for us tonight.”

With three Bucs, led by AJ Williamson, defending Culberson, they limited the standout forward to 12 points, half of which came in the final quarter.

“We just tried to make sure on the catch that we had a body on him and a second guy coming to him,” Briggs said about the Bucs’ defensive strategy of stopping the 6-6 Culberson.

“The kids stayed disciplined and we did it for four quarters.”

Chartiers-Houston could only find offensive scoring in the first two quarters from Andrew Clark and Hanley, who combined for all of the Bucs’ first-half points. Clark finished with 20 points.

Hindered by turnovers throughout the night, Fort Cherry turned to its other presence in the post, Zach Vincenti, who scored 13 points.

“The biggest thing for us is getting on the defensive end and just scrapping,” Hanley said. “We hear them saying there is no competition but I think that they forgot about us. We shut them down.”