St. Rose, Manasquan Look to Exorcise Demons in SCT Semifinal

Over the last two seasons, there has been only one boys basketball team in the Shore Conference that has been capable of playing with St. Rose and that team is Manasquan.

During this current season, there has been only one team in the Shore Conference that has been able to beat Manasquan and that teams is St. Rose.

Even though the winner of Wednesday’s Shore Conference Tournament semifinal in Toms River between No. 1 seed Manasquan and No. 4 St. Rose will still have one more win to go before raising the trophy, the SCT championship could very well be on the line in the second semifinal game on Wednesday at RWJ Barnabas Health Arena.

“For us, it doesn’t really matter who we play or when we play,” St. Rose junior Jayden Hodge said. “It kind of motivates us that we are the four seed, so we just keep that in our head. We’re going to show them that we are supposed to be the number one seed.”

St. Rose has demolished every Shore Conference team in its path over the past two seasons and the only one to provide a modicum of resistance has been this year’s Manasquan team, which lost both regular-season meetings against the Purple Roses in games that remained close into the fourth quarter. In fact, Manasquan led by 12 points in the fourth quarter back in December before St. Rose closed on a 19-2 run to win, 50-45. St. Rose then won in late January, 61-48.

“It was a lot of feeling out by both teams,” Manasquan senior Griffin Linstra said of the first two meetings. “We got to know how they play. We’re very close with a lot of their players away from the high-school basketball scene too, so it was really just two intense battles. I think we know we’re capable of playing with them and we’re going to come with a lot of juice and it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Not only is Manasquan the only team that has looked at all capable of making this current version of St. Rose look vulnerable, but the teams will be playing in the only building that has provided St. Rose with a bad Shore Conference memory over the last three years. In the 2023 Shore Conference Tournament in Toms River, St. Rose gave up an 13-point lead in the final 2-plus minutes of regulation and lost to Ranney in overtime in the SCT semifinals.

“Nothing great comes easy,” said St. Rose senior Evan Romano, who was a starter on the 2022-23 team after transferring in from Holmdel High School. “In a way, that loss kind of helped us. We didn’t win the Shore that year and we’re seeing a team that we beat earlier in the season (Manasquan) go on and win it. We worked our asses off that summer to make sure we were ready to win it the next year and I think losing that game was where a lot of that motivation came from.”

Three current starters from that St. Rose team — Hodge, Romano and Bryan Ebeling — were starters on that 2022-23 Purple Roses team and that game turned out to be a crossroads for the St. Rose program. The Purple Roses followed that loss with a road loss at Marlboro in a tune-up game between the SCT and NJSIAA Tournament and have since rattled off 29 straight wins vs. Shore Conference competition, with the two games vs. Manasquan this season the only ones that have been decided by fewer than 20 points.

Wednesday will mark the first time St. Rose is playing at RWJ Barnabas Health Arena since losing to Ranney in 2023 and the players who were part of that loss are not running from that memory.

“That’s something that is going to fire me up because I didn’t play good in that gym,” said Hodge, recalling his experience as a freshman in that game. “That was really a tough loss, so we are just going to do our thing.”

“One hundred percent,” Romano said of returning to the arena in Toms River serving as a motivating factor. “Anybody on our team who walks into that gym on Wednesday is going to feel the pain that we felt two years ago, when we know we should have won the game and maybe gone on to win that Shore Conference Tournament. We don’t want to feel that again and if we do find ourselves in that situation, where it’s close, I think we’re going to feel a lot more confident just because we have done it so many times the last two years.”

After overwhelming its Shore Conference competition — as well as most of its in-state competition on the whole — in 2023-24, St. Rose has been more vulnerable this season. In addition to the two competitive games vs. Manasquan, St. Rose led Central Regional by only three points at halftime on Saturday in the SCT quarterfinals before a 40-21 second half helped the Purple Roses put away a 73-51 win over just the second Shore-ranked team St. Rose has faced this season.

“Everybody wants to beat us, because we’re the defending champs,” Hodge said. “Everybody wants to be the team that beats us, so we just have to have the mentality that it’s not going to happen. We have to play better from the jump; we can’t just play good for 16 minutes. That’s not always going to work.”

As usual, Hodge was a standout on both ends Saturday with 25 points, eight rebounds, three assists, five steals and three blocked shots, while Romano followed up scoring his 1,000th career point vs. Jackson Memorial on Thursday by scoring 13 points, including a crushing 28-foot three-pointer as time expired in the third quarter to put St. Rose ahead, 56-39.

“In a lot of ways, this feels like an even bigger stage than some of the other games we have played in,” Romano said, comparing the significance of the Shore Conference Tournament to that of the high-level showcases in which St. Rose has played this season. “For me, it’s my senior year and any time you are in a tournament or the playoffs, every game could be your last one. I might never get to play in another Shore Conference game, so every game feels like the most important game of the season.”

While St. Rose has had limited chances to showcase its ability vs. other Shore Conference contenders like Central, Manasquan has run through the entire upper-echelon of the conference this season, which helped the Warriors land the No. 1 seed in this year’s SCT. They have played every team seeded in the top six spots in the tournament and went 4-2 in those six games, with the two losses coming against St. Rose and one win each vs. Christian Brothers Academy, Central, Rumson-Fair Haven and Red Bank.

Manasquan’s final tune-up before a third chance to beat St. Rose this season was a 61-31 rout of No. 9 Colts Neck Saturday in which Linstra posted 15 points, 13 rebounds and three assists to lead the way. Now in his fourth year as a varsity starter at Manasquan, Linstra will be playing in the SCT semifinals for the fourth straight year as part of a streak of seven straight seasons in which Manasquan has reached the Shore final four. If the Warriors can pull off their first win over St. Rose since Jan. of 2023, they will then play in their seventh straight title game — an accomplishment that has only been reached one other time in the history of the tournament and not since 1968.

“It’s all about the town,” Linstra said. “It’s a town full of winners and it just runs in the water for us. We don’t even really focus on winning, we just focus on playing really well and that leads to us winning. That culture that we have and being here before really helps us in those big moments.”

In past years, a St. Rose-vs. Manasquan clash would not have happened until the championship game at Monmouth University. St. Rose would have been the clear No. 1 seed and Manasquan the clear No. 2, but a change in the seeding procedure — NJSIAA power points determined the order of seeding this season — landed St. Rose No. 4, thus lining the Purple Roses up to play Manasquan in the semifinals. That could be the difference between Manasquan making it to a seventh straight championship game and that streak ending.

“Every year, we get a challenge thrown at us,” Linstra said. “Last year, it happened to us in the last game (vs. Camden), so it’s just another challenge. We’re so together as a team, we’re going to lean on each other and we’re going to get through it.”

The winner of Wednesday’s game will have to collect itself for Friday’s championship game because one thing is for sure: both teams are ready to go all out to beat the other.

“It’s what we’ve got to do to get what we want,” Linstra said of beating St. Rose in the semifinals. “We know we were going to have to play them at some point and if it happens here, then it happens here. We’ll be ready for the battle.”

“Manasquan is a great team,” Hodge said. “It’s not easy to beat a team like that three times, so we’ve got to be ready.”