Despite putting together a near-perfect season, the CESJDS boys varsity basketball team fell short on Saturday night, losing in the PVAC championship game to the Sandy Spring Friends School 75-46.

At the start of the game, Sandy Spring jumped out to an early 15-3 lead. Malakai Parker, a guard from Sandy Spring, hit a pull-up three-point shot over junior Josh Abramowitz on the first play of the game, setting the tone for the rest of the matchup.

JDS was unable to trim Sandy Spring’s early lead to single digits. The halftime score of the game was 38-20, and afterwards Sandy Spring’s lead only continued to grow.

At the end of the game, Sandy Spring had four players finish with at least 10 points while the Lions only had one, junior Bryan Knapp.

Knapp was upset by the outcome of the game, as the team had worked hard to get to the championship and he believed that it was an unfortunate way for the season to end.

“I think we played well, they just played significantly better,” Knapp said. “I was upset only because we hadn’t lost yet, so it was a weird feeling because we lost. I think our record speaks for itself and our season went really well.”  

Although JDS did not play to the expectations they had set for themselves with their undefeated regular season, coach Dave McCloud is still proud of the way his team played this season overall.

“We won the conference championship, you know I was really proud of [the team] when we beat Sandy [in] the first two games we played them because we’ve had to overcome a lot of obstacles,” McCloud said. “I was proud when we beat [The Field School] in the semifinals because that’s a good team. They shoot the ball very well and we had to do some different things that we were normally not used to doing.”  

Coming into the championship game, McCloud knew that whichever team played the better defense would most likely win the game. Not only did Sandy Spring play lockdown defense on JDS, but they also overall had an effective shooting performance, something McCloud thinks surprised the JDS team.

Junior Caleb Gershengorn echoed McCloud’s thoughts on the game. While Gershengorn was disappointed by the loss, he believed that Sandy Spring deserved to win the championship.   

“I think we played well together as a team, really fought hard, but overall just missed some shots and made some mistakes and it all added up,” Gershengorn said. “Sandy Spring is a really good team, and we had to play our absolute best to beat them. We did it twice this year, but we just didn’t have it last night.”

Even though JDS could not win McCloud his first PVAC championship, he is still happy with the team’s performance.

“It’s been a long season and we were undefeated for the whole season and I take that away as a fantastic, phenomenal job being undefeated the whole season,” McCloud said.