August Martin girls nip Francis Lewis

The television and print media are saturated with coverage of the inauguration of Barack Obama, but in an article about an Inauguration Day sports event, please forgive a little more: On Tuesday, January 20, hours after a president spoke of “hope” in an address from the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, a girls’ basketball team from August Martin High School seemed to have found some of its own.
If you walked to the gym of the Jamaica high school on Tuesday evening, you would have passed an outdoor marquee reading “Congratulations President Obama,” a wall full of “Yes We Can” student-made posters, and an auditorium from which hundreds of students interrupted the school day’s regular schedule to watch the proceedings on Capitol Hill. Finally, through the lobby, down the locker-room hallway, and through the gym doors at the very end, you would have seen August Martin topple Francis Lewis by a score of 61-58.
It wasn’t hard to anticipate that Tuesday’s game would be a good one. August Martin and Francis Lewis, the two best PSAL girls’ hoops teams in Queens, have been mutual antagonists from the first game of the season, when Lewis edged out Martin 73-72. Their games, in fact, have been uncannily close since November 2007, when August Martin won by three points in overtime.
The last minute was frantic. Martin was leading 59-57, but a Francis Lewis steal presented the Patriots with two chances to tie the game or take the lead. On the first, junior guard Kelly Robinson missed a mid-range jump shot. Following a timeout and a jump ball that went Francis Lewis’ way, Robinson missed a three-pointer. Teammate Andree Kar de Leon, a senior forward, was forced to foul sophomore forward Starasia Lawley with 24 seconds remaining. She failed to convert, leaving the door open.
Not long after, Francis Lewis earned its next chance to tie, with sophomore Tatiana Wilson at the line with two shots in front of her. Wilson, who had previously shredded the August Martin defense with a smooth three-pointer and a breakaway bank shot in two consecutive possessions, missed the first and hit the second. With 4.4 seconds left, there was no choice but to foul senior forward Krystina Agard, and to hope that her accomplished three-point shot did not translate to the free-throw line.
She hit both foul shots - putting August Martin up by three - and Robinson’s last-second bid to tie, taken just outside the arc, was no good. The Falcon bench erupted and embraced.
The not-so-secret formula Martin used on the Patriots was the phenomenal long-range shooting of Agard, whose fortunes mirrored her team’s for much of the evening. The Falcons, just like she, were messy early on, setting up three-point attempts that typically ended in bricks or air balls. But after a few minutes, the shots started to fall.
Agard emerged from the game with 25 points and five-three pointers, four of them in the second half. In one memorable third-quarter sequence, she dropped a trey on two consecutive August Martin possessions, then helped put down a Francis Lewis surge by hitting another one shortly thereafter.
In the second quarter, Agard made a name for herself on defense, violently bringing down Lewis junior center Sabrina Jeridore on an attempted layup that never left Jeridore’s hands. August Martin was awarded the ball, and Jeridore, walking off the court with a slight limp, smacked the bench with both hands.
Meanwhile, Lewis’ offense sputtered, limiting its chances by committing repeated turnovers near the basket. For the Patriots, there were too many loose possessions, too many bad passes. Ascher, of course, was pleased.
“We’re playing solid defense,” he said. “We shut down the big girl [Jeridore], and that was the key to the game. She didn’t do so much.”
The win was eagerly received by the August Martin audience. Rarely has a crowd so sparing - in a cramped gym where a few late arrivals may very well have brushed up against Francis Lewis’ guards - echoed “De-fense” so loudly throughout the course of a game here.
But that doesn’t mean it was expected. While eligibility problems limited Martin to a two-player bench this season, Lewis had long appeared unfazed by its own personnel issues. Three brand-new arrivals joined the Patriots before the start of the season. Their coach, Michael Eisenberg, was reassigned midway through the year and replaced by guidance counselor Stephen Tsai. Through it all, Francis Lewis compiled a record of 7-1, while August Martin’s 5-3 was somewhat more modest.
Now, Tuesday’s defeat of Lewis, previously seen as the top team in the borough, has shaken up a few predictions of how this season would end.