March of Champions: Manasquan Slays Wall, Continues Push for 7th Straight Title

WALL TWP. — Everything about how the 2025-26 season transpired suggested this was the year for the Wall boys basketball team to make a run at an NJSIAA state championship by taking on a host of perennial contenders from the Shore Conference.

When the season came down to one game on Tuesday at Wall High School, it turned out it was not Wall’s year, because based on the last decade, just about every year is Manasquan’s year.

After losing to Wall in each of the prior two meetings this season, Manasquan found enough to battle past the Crimson Knights — the No. 1 seed in the Central Jersey Group II section — for a 42-37 win that propels the fifth-seeded Warriors to the sectional final round of the NJSIAA Tournament for the seventh straight season.

“We’re ready for these moments,” Manasquan senior forward Jack O’Reilly said. “We’ve been looking for this (championship) game on Friday and we knew if we played the game that we know we should and can play, that was how it was going to work out.

For the third straight year, Manasquan will host Rumson-Fair Haven in the Central Jersey Group II championship game, which is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Friday night. The Warriors will prepare a gameplan to win a third straight sectional final against rival Rumson thanks to their successful execution of a plan to beat a Wall team trying to beat Manasquan for a third time this season.

“Coach (Andrew Bilodeau) has emphasized it, especially the last couple of days and weeks in practice that we’re six-time consecutive (sectional) champs,” O’Reilly said. “That’s something that everyone wants to come for and everyone wants to beat the six-time champ. I think it shows our preparation. Our coaches, they know how to get a good team to play like a good team. We knew we could be a good team from the very beginning of the season. Maybe it didn’t show because we weren’t scoring 80 or 90 points per game, but we knew if we could rely on our defense, we could trust our coaches to get us prepared for this moment.”

The celebration of Friday’s win was tempered due to the events immediately following the game. Manasquan head coach Andrew Bilodeau collapsed shortly after the final buzzer and was taken by ambulance to Jersey Short Medical Center, where he was reported by his family to be in stable condition. Assistant coach Ryan Ritchey spoke on behalf of the coaching staff following the performance.

“We felt like the pressure was on (Wall),” Ritchey said. “They have the more senior team, they were in their gym, the number one seed. Our guys could just focus on the game plan. We felt like the last time we played them, we made a few key mistakes that led to some made shots that were the difference in that game and our primary focus was cleaning up those mistakes. When we got to the gym, I thought the energy in pregame was off the charts. I walked in the gym knowing what we wanted to do and felling confident we were going to play well.”

Junior Logan Cleveland and sophomores Luke Winn and Kennedy Larned were the scoring standouts in Manasquan’s balanced attack Tuesday, but the star was O’Reilly, who inhaled 22 rebounds to go with four points. In a 41-39 loss to Wall on Feb. 14 in the Shore Conference Tournament quarterfinals, Manasquan held Wall scoreless for the final five minutes and the Crimson Knights closed the game with zero defensive rebounds in the entire fourth quarter of that game.

“I had a lot of confidence to shoot because I knew Jack-O was there for the rebound,” Winn said of O’Reilly. “Every single game, he’s on the boards. By far, he is the most consistent player on our team. I think he is the best player on our team just because of that. No matter who we’re playing, it’s the same stat line every time.”

“I have never seen anybody rebound like that,” Ritchey said. “He was incredible. He does it every game and tonight was another level.”

On Tuesday, Manasquan’s advantage on the glass carried on thanks to O’Reilly, as well as the 6-foot-7 Cleveland, who finished with a team-high 11 points and six rebounds.

“That’s something we definitely emphasized: just boxing out and getting every rebound,” O’Reilly said. “It’s more offensive possessions for us and that’s less offensive possessions for them when we defensive rebound. That’s a point of emphasis, especially when we weren’t hitting our shots in the quarter. We knew we could rely on getting an offensive rebound to try to get another good look.”

Larned jump-started Manasquan by scoring six of the team’s first eight points and eight of his nine points in the first half. Winn complemented his fellow sophomore by scoring eight of his 10 points in the second half, including five during a 7-0 run that turned a 27-27 deadlock into a 34-27 lead for Manasquan with 3:46 to go.

Winn spent his freshman year at St. Rose playing on the opposite side against Manasquan’s biggest Shore Conference rival over the past three years. He transferred to Manasquan after the departure of former St. Rose coach Brian Lynch to CBA and has embraced being a scoring threat off the bench in his first team in the new program.

“I have been in gyms like this (with St. Rose) and situations like this,” Winn said. “I wasn’t necessarily in the game, but it’s nice to be a part of it. It just felt right. A couple of those shots, I knew they were going in.

“Coming here, all the guys, they welcomed me like a brother. The first thing coach told me when I told him I was transferring here, he said, ‘Be a part of the Squan culture.’ I did that and everything just clicked. These guys welcomed me, they didn’t hold any resentment because of where I came from. There was a little bad blood between those two teams.”

Both Larned and Winn have spent time coming off the bench this season, with Winn scoring his 10 points on Tuesday off the bench. In their 40-20 December loss to Wall, it did not matter which players were in the game; Manasquan could not find anyone to score. It took the Warriors nearly 14 minutes to score their first point in the Kevin Williams Classic semifinal game and they trailed, 23-4, at halftime.

While the offense has been a work in progress throughout the year, the defense has been a strong suit of the team from the start. On Tuesday, Manasquan became just the second team to hold Wall under 40 points this season and held all but one of Wall’s players under 10 points. Senior Brian McKenna led the Crimson Knights with 14 points and five rebounds, with senior Dan Hennessy adding eight in the loss.

The Manasquan defense also held Wall to just one three-pointer, which was the front-end of a four-point play by senior Jake DeBrito to cut Manasquan’s lead to 39-35 with under 40 seconds to play. Wall finished the game 1-for-12 from beyond the three-point line.

The Crimson Knights’ pursuit of their first sectional championship since back-to-back Central Group III titles in 2019 and 2020 ends with Wall going 21-3 during the season with a Shore Conference Class A Central division championship and trips to the semifinals in both the Shore Conference and Central Group II Tournaments. Wall started the season 17-0, won the Kevin Williams Christmas Class Jim Ruhnke Bracket in December and beat Manasquan for the first time since the turn of the century. Tuesday marks the second straight year in which a 20-win season by Wall has ended with a loss to Manasquan in the sectional semifinals.

Manasquan threatened to break the game open in the third, when Winn hit a three-pointer, followed by a floater by sophomore Sean Bilodeau (six points) to put the Warriors ahead, 25-18. Wall responded with a pair of baskets by McKenna before the end of the third quarter, and senior Liam Killea converted a three-point play to tie the game, 27-27, early in the fourth.

Although Manasquan has made the sectional final round its home while establishing itself as a team on the short list for the moniker of best public school team in the state, the Warriors would have been forgiven had they fallen short of the title game this season. In addition to graduating four of its top seven players from last year, Manasquan lost first-team All-Shore junior guard Rey Weinseimer for the entire season due to surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his knee. Weinseimer is now practicing with the team, but has yet to make his season debut.

With Weinseimer out for the year, Cleveland and O’Reilly have been the only returning constants on the team, and Jack Lattimer is the only other senior who plays significant minutes. Despite the losses to graduation and the loss of Weinseimer, Manasquan again finds itself a win over Rumson away from a seventh straight sectional title.

At the beginning of the year, the Manasquan mantra was “You better get us in December.” That sentiment proved true with Rumson, which routed Manasquan, 65-47, at Manasquan in the first meeting between the teams in early January, then dropped a home game to the Warriors in early February, 43-32.

“We’ve been saying it since December: ‘You better get us now,'” Ritchey said. “In March, we are going to be a completely different team. We only had two returning players who played in these games last year, so we knew we were going to take our lumps early, but as long as the guys stayed positive and stuck with the coaching and our preparation, we were going to be there at the end.”

“Championships aren’t won in December,” O’Reilly said. “We know we are not playing to our peak or our full potential on December 10th or whatever date you want to pick. We’re only going to get better, and we definitely proved that. We proved that we can play with some tough teams and that we’re a championship-caliber team.”

When the two teams meet on Friday, Manasquan could be without its head coach after Tuesday night’s scare in Wall. Five years ago, Bilodeau missed three games for health reasons and Ritchey coached the team to a Shore Conference Playoff championship during the COVID-shortened 2021 season.

Ritchey is prepared to do the same if necessary, but missing Bilodeau on the sidelines for the biggest game of the year would be a tremendous void for a Manasquan team that is much younger than the 2021 squad, which was full of contributors from the 2020 SCT championship team, including Shore Conference Player of the Year Ben Roy.

“It’s all him,” Ritchey said of Bilodeau, who is 19 wins shy of 500 for his career. “I have never seen a better motivator, and I’ve never seen a coach who is so good at getting guys to believe, to trust themselves and to just play their guts out for each other. He gets guys to play outside of and beyond their abilities. He has his saying and his methods, and the guys totally buy in. He’s got a lot of experience and he has won a lot of games, so having him is a big advantage.”