Most onlookers didn’t give Harrison much of a chance heading into its Class A first-round playoff game against Ardsley on Feb. 18. The Huskies came into the meeting as a No. 24-seed, having won an outbracket game last week against John Jay, while the Panthers, seeded eighth, had two prior wins over the visitors this season. But on Saturday, Harrison showed just how important resilience and dedication can be, as they stunned Ardsley in one of the biggest postseason upsets in recent history, beating their league foes 59-58 in an instant classic.
Harrison stormed out to a hot start, taking a 34-19 lead before the half. Ardsley roared back late in the game however, taking a 58-57 lead with just under six seconds left to play before Luke McCarthy gave Harrison the lead for good, with a pair of foul shots with 3.9 seconds on the clock.
An ensuing half-court shot by Ardsley clanged off the front of the rim, ensuring that the Huskies would advance to the Class A quarterfinals where they will take on Byram Hills.
Will Marriott and Max Scoli each had 16 points to pace the Huskies, and Marriott also grabbed 15 rebounds in the win.
According to head coach Gary Chiarella, the Huskies came into Saturday’s game with more confidence than one might expect from a No. 24-seed.
“Our mindset was that we’d played them twice, lost a close game the first time around, the second time we lost by 10,” Chiarella said. “But we’ve improved 1,000 percent since then.”
Forced to play perhaps the toughest schedule of any other Section I team, wins were rare for the young, untested Huskies early on. Over the course of the year, however, Chiarella saw that his team’s refusal to quit could pay dividends if they were able to secure a playoff berth.
“We had a lot of kids who had not played any varsity games, and the strength of schedule we faced didn’t really give us time to get acclimated or used to the speed of the varsity game,” he said. “But this has been a special group; even when the losses were piling up early on, not one player had a bad thing to say and they kept on working extremely hard as our confidence kept growing.”
The Huskies will once again play the role of underdogs on Thursday, after press time, when they go up against a top-seeded Byram Hills team that has garnered some consideration as the best Class A team in the state. The Bobcats, the defending Class A champs, enter the postseason having won 14 straight games. If the Huskies hope to compete with the bigger Byram team, Chiarella said, they will have to focus on the fundamentals.
“We have to be able to slow the pace down and we have to rebound the ball; we have been hurt at times by other team’s offensive rebounds,” he said. “And third, we just can’t turn the ball over.”
