Brown Leads Spartans into Sweet 16
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Every night, it seems like a different member of the Monument Mountain boys basketball team is ready to take a starring role.
In Saturday's Division 4 State Tournament opener, Manny Brown was the next man up.
Brown hit six 3-pointers -- three in the first quarter -- and scored 22 points in a 77-59 win over Cape Cod Academy.
Brown, who also contributed a couple of big second half assists to help the Spartans pull away down the stretch, credited his teammates with putting him in position to convert from beyond the arc.
"When we drive to the paint, our bigs do a really good job of kicking it out," he said. "They find the open man man in the corner against a collapsing defense."
Spartans coach Randy Koldys credited Brown with making himself the kind of player who can take advantage of those opportunities.
"There hasn't been a kid who has worked harder on his shot all season long, trying to get better at it," Koldys said. "He just had a couple of tweaks that we had to maneuver, and after we did that, it was basically the fact that he needed some confidence to hit one.
"Then he hit one, then he hit two, then he hit three. He kept us in the ballgame in the first half. He really was a key part of the whole first half, scoring 17 points. So that was pretty cool to see right there."
Brown hit two more 3s in the second quarter and had a drive to the basket from the right wing to account for more than half Monument Mountain's points in taking a 33-26 lead into the locker room.
It would have been a bigger lead if not for Cape Cod Academy's nine-point run to end the half after Sebastian Guete-Ramirez (11 points) put back a rebound and got an and-one to make it 33-17 with 3:41 left in the second quarter.
The Spartans were able to re-establish a double-digit lead early in the third when Kyle Wellenkamp (12 points) converted an assist from Khalil Carlson (11 points) to make it 41-31.
But Cape Cod Academy, which dropped a 73-67 decision to the Spartans in its first trip across the commonwealth for an independent game back in December, kept coming back.
The visitors quickly answered with a 7-0 spurt to make it a one-possession game.
That's when Brown hit his sixth 3 of the afternoon to start an 8-0 Spartan run that also included his assist on a 3 from Isaiah Keefner.
A big reason the Spartans were able to hold off CCA in the third quarter was Griffin McElroy, who scored nine of his 13 points in the period.
"We told [McElroy] the first day of practice: I took my keys to my car out and said, 'You have the keys to the car the whole year,' and we're not going to take them back," Koldys said. "Whatever you do with it, you do with it. If you crash, you crash. If you keep on driving the way you're supposed to then it's your car forever.
"He's had a lot of responsibility on him."
Cape Cod came back one more time, drawing within six points at the start of the fourth quarter on a putback from Mike Berry (20 points).
But Wellenkamp put back an offensive rebound at the other end to start an 8-0 run for the Spartans that ended with a Guete-Ramirez bucket assisted by Brown.
That made it a 14-point lead with about four minutes to go, and Cape Cod Academy never got closer than 12 the rest of the way.
No. 11 Monument Mountain (18-3) moves on to Tuesday's Sweet 16 matchup at No. 6 Clinton (18-3). It is anyone's guess who might lead the Spartans' offense that night.
"I think that with our team right here, we have different guys who can step up and do that," Koldys said. "Against Wahconah in the [Western Mass] quarter-finals, Isaiah Keefner stepped up and scored 15.
"We're having different guys step up and do stuff. We really have a lot of different weapons if we choose to use them. Sometimes, we choose to use them but we fire blanks. Today, we weren't firing blanks. It was pretty cool to see."