BARRE, VT- The Windsor boys’ basketball team took down Williamstown in the Division 3 championship game on Saturday night 71-59, and can now call themselves state champs.
After trailing by five at the half, the Yellowjackets came out firing on all cylinders in the second-half, outscoring the Blue Devils by ten points in the third, and seven points in the fourth. It was Windsor’s depth that helped them maintain their lead late in the game. “All of my guys played good, really. My bench came in and played well,” said Windsor head coach, Harry Ladue, “We’ve done that all year long. We’ve gone nine-to-ten deep. We just keep rolling ‘em in there and they all play well. They’re all equal parts.” The Yellowjackets had seven different scorers in the fourth quarter alone.
Early on, however, it was a one-man show offensively for the Yellowjackets. Senior Seth Balch started the game out with four 3-pointers before three minutes had come off the clock. At the 5:02 mark in the first, the Blue Devils’ coach, Jack Carrier, was forced to call a timeout as Windsor got out to a quick 12-4 lead behind Balch’s lights-out shooting against a Blue Devil 3-2 zone defense.
Coach Ladue, on Balch, said, “He really got us going out of the gate.” On his hot start, Balch said, “It felt great to start hot but you’ve got to take that for what it is and continue playing. It also gave us momentum which was great.”
After the Williamstown timeout, The Blue Devils strung together an 11-0 run over the next three minutes, and were right back in the game. Over this stretch, senior Nathan Poulin was huge for the Blue Devils. He dominated the offensive glass, scoring four points on put-backs. Williamstown then hit back-to-back threes. Their run was finally stopped by a Ben Meagher baby-hook at the 1:35 mark. Despite their hot start, the Yellowjackets trailed 17-14 after one.
To start the second frame, Blue Devil guard, Tyler Orton, hit a 3 from the left wing at the 7:20 mark to go up by six. This was Williamstown’s largest lead of the game. After Windsor missed an open shot on their next possession, coach Ladue put Balch back into the game, and he was the instant spark that they needed. Balch went on a personal 8-0 run over the next minute and a half, including two threes and a steal for a layup, to give Windsor back the lead. Balch single-handedly forced Williamstown to switch from a zone to a man-to-man defense. Windsor changed up their defense as well, as they put on a full-court press over the final five minutes of the half, but this did not go in their favor.
Williamstown had no trouble beating the pressure. Colby Gingras hit two 3’s for the Blue Devils, both coming after they broke the Windsor press. The Blue Devils hit eight free-throws over the final four minutes of the first half, as the Yellowjackets fell into foul trouble after being overly aggressive. At the half, Williamstown led 35-30 despite 22 first-half points from Balch.
Post-game, on heading into the half facing a deficit, Balch said, “The back and forth is what you expect coming into a championship game. You expect a fight. They were a great, great team. They’re great every year. When you get down, we know as an older group of kids with six seniors, that it happens. We just kept fighting, kept pushing… heading to the locker room at half-time, we had to adjust. We changed up our defense a little, and we just fought.”
The Yellowjackets installed a half-court trap in the second half that helped them get takeaways and claim the lead. Windsor made two quick baskets to start the half, a three-pointer by Robert Slocum and a mid-range jumper from Dakota Page, to tie the game at 35 apiece at the 7:25 mark. “It was good to hit our first shot,” said Ladue, “They had the ball first, they could have gone up seven, it was real big for us.”
After a layup by Williamstown’s Garrett Metcalf, Balch would respond with a big three that erupted the Windsor crowd and tied the game 40-40 at the 4:11 mark. A big turning point in the game came with just under two minutes left in the third with the game tied at 42; Williamstown broke the Windsor trap beautifully, and this led to a driving layup in the middle of the lane by Poulin, but Windsor senior Adam Stapleton slid over and took a big charge. This both boosted Windsor’s energy in the gym and ignited the Yellowjackets on a 10-0 run over the game’s next four minutes.
The Blue Devils brought the deficit down to six points after back-to-back threes by Gingras and Tassie, but Balch would respond with back-to-back buckets of his own to push the Windsor lead back to ten, 58-48 with 3:30 left in the game. Williamstown started intentionally fouling with about two minutes left to try to extend the game, but the lead withstood due to clutch foul-shooting by the Yellowjackets. Page would hit five late free-throws, and score seven fourth quarter points, to help seal the win. “In the fourth I was just trying to be a little more aggressive scoring so that it could open things up for us a little more and take what we could get, ” said Page. The Yellowjackets held on to win 71-59 and claim their D-III state title.
Coach Ladue, post-game, had this to say: “Got in a little hole there. We battled back and played a great second half. Our defense really took over in the second half… made a lot of stops, got out in the open court, and good things started to happen for us. We stopped their dribble penetration. They were killing us off the dribble in the first half. We tried to take the ball out of [Jacob Tassie’s] hands and made somebody else beat us because he’s really quick.” Tassie led the Blue Devils with 22 points. Gingras and Poulin each added 12.
Balch led the Yellowjackets with a career-high 36 points. On coming up big when it mattered the most, Balch said, “It means the world to me to be able to give my team that performance especially on that stage, the guys I play with work so incredibly hard and are so driven to succeed that being able to support the team like that feels incredible.” Balch now has four state titles in his high school career. He won two for football and one for baseball. Juniors Ryland Richardson and Robert Slocum and seniors Dakota Page and Duncan Frazer were also on those teams. Post-game, Balch said, “The feeling of being a state champion will never get old. In fact, this one may have been sweeter than the rest. And to do it as a senior with some of my closest friends is more than anything I ever could’ve asked for.”
On what this win meant for him, Adam Stapleton was able to say this after being speechless for a moment: “It feels amazing. I couldn’t ask for anything else. It feels so good. I’m so happy that we could give our coach the victory here and I know he deserves it just as much as every player on this team.”
Dakota Page scored 9 points for the Yellowjackets, and was a hound on the defensive side of the ball. “Page played one heck of a game defensively,” said coach Ladue post-game. On what this title means to him, Page said, “It’s pretty indescribable. The last two times we’ve been here it didn’t end the way we wanted. That left a bitter taste in our mouths and we just wanted to go out there and try to experience the other side of those feelings and it was a huge win not just for us but the Windsor basketball community in general.”
Balch, Stapleton, Page, Ben Meagher, Duncan Frazer, and Tate Hurd all get to leave high school basketball calling themselves state champions. On his senior group, Ladue said, “They’re great leaders. They come to practice every day and work their butts off. They’re great teammates. They take care of their own stuff. If someone’s screwing around, I don’t have to say anything. They’ll reel each other in. They were good at that.”
This Windsor team beat a Blue Devil program that had won five of the previous six state titles, and now claim the title of state champion as the girls team did just a week ago. It is the Windsor boys’ first championship since 2008, when Coach Ladue led Windsor to the state title in Division 2.
By Kameron Towle, sports editor
Photo Credit: Zabrina Campney
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