Knight boys open against Wall
By: Bob Nuse
Doug Caracappa knows the West Windsor-Plainsboro North boys’ basketball team that will open the state tournament on Tuesday is a different team than the one that opened the season in December.
"At the beginning of the year we had some new players and it took us some time to get used to playing with each other," the senior co-captain said. "Ryan Moore had never played organized basketball before and now he’s turned out to be a real good player who has done a lot for the team.
"And Jon Garrett came in during the middle of the season and he’s turned out to be a good player for us. We had a couple guys come up from the JV. It just took us a while to get going."
The Knights got rolling in mid-January and haven’t slowed down since. After falling to 3-6 with a 51-42 loss to Trenton on Jan. 17, North went on an eight-game winning streak to qualify for the Central Jersey Group III tournament for the first time. Overall, they’ve won 11 of their last 13 games and took a 14-8 record into Thursday’s regular season finale against Notre Dame.
"I think as a team, we’ve become more team oriented than we were at the beginning of the season," said North coach Eric Becker, whose team will open play in the state tournament on Tuesday at 6 p.m. against Wall as part of a doubleheader with the girls playing at 8 p.m. "We don’t have a 20-point scorer on this team, but we have three or four guys that score between nine and 13 points. That’s something I like about this team.
"We were 3-6 and we had just lost a close game to Trenton. At that point the kids could have thrown in the towel. But they believed in each other and had confidence in each other. We beat Princeton in a close game the next time out and got ourselves going on a nice streak."
That streak was good enough to lead them to a No. 5 seed for the CJ III tournament. In just their third season as a varsity program, the Knights are in the postseason.
"That was one of our goals at the beginning of the season, to make the states," said Caracappa, who is averaging just over six points a game for the Knights. "We have some guys on this team that have been playing varsity for three years now. Ricky (Pyfrom), Brian (Sufalko), Chip (Dow) and I all played on that first team. We didn’t win much, but we got a lot of experience playing at the varsity level.
"Those other years I don’t think we expected to win. This year we expected to win and be able to compete and stay in every game. We played a lot of close games last year and in the end, we wouldn’t win. But this year we’re winning a lot of the close games."
The Knights have played nine games this season that have been decided by three points or less, winning five of them. The experience in those games should help when the states start next week.
"It’s been a real good year for us," Caracappa said. "It’s nice because the first two years we were losing a majority of our games. But we’ve worked hard and the coaches have worked hard. And now we’re winning because of that hard work."
"The kids deserve a lot of credit," Becker added. "I’m proud of them for what they’ve done this season. We set goals for this season and we’ve reached a lot of them. We wanted to make the states and we’ve done that. We wanted to be more competitive in the CVC and we’ve done that. And we’ve played well enough to get a home game in the states, which is great.
"We lost eight guys from last year’s team, so we had a new group this year. We had some guys up from the JV and some new to the program. And we had Ricky, Brian, Doug and Chip from last year. We added (Mike) Pilgrim and (Mike) Mierowitz. And Ryan Moore and Jon Garrett came in. The guys who have been here three years have a lot of experience now and that has helped. They’ve learned a lot about how to play the game."
Right now, the Knights are playing the game very well. And they hope that carries over to Tuesday night’s CJ III opener.

