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Final Thre e

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isgah defeated Centennial I, 72-57,
becoming the "A" League playoff
champions as the B'nai B'rith Bas-
ketball League ended its 21st sea-
son on Sunday, March 31.
Pat Foley, with 25 points, was high scor-
er for Pisgah, with teammate Jonathan
Witz scoring 20. Leading scorer for Cen-
tennial I was Tim Schwartz with 32 points.
The "B" League playoff was won by
Brotherhood I, beating Keidan 52-46, and
Brotherhood V took the "C" League cham-
pionship in a 61-49 win over the Down-
town-Fox team.
The "A" League finals matched the top
two regular season teams, as Pisgah (9-
1) and Centennial I (7-3) both dominated
their semifinal opponents.
"I think we wore them down," Foley said
after the championship game. "We were
a lot quicker, and we just had a lot more
depth." Foley is a 30-year-old who in his fi-
nal collegiate year captained the Marquette
University basketball team. He played in
the NBA Summer League in 1988 until he
injured his knee.
Pisgah, using fast breaks and playing
strong defense, took an early lead. The
team worked the ball inside, dominated

p

Top left: Jonathon Wit
rebounds in front of
Russell Peters.

Top right: Pat Foley of Pisgah
drives against Centennial's
Jim Schwartz.

Above: Jonathon Witz of
Pisgah brings the ball
up court.

The B'nai B'rith League crowns
three basketball champions.

YAACOV D. SCHOLAR SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

the boards and after seven minutes held a
15-4 lead.
With 10 minutes left in the half (the
B'nai B'rith Basketball League plays two
20-minute halves), Centennial I switched
from a man-to-man defense to a zone. Pis-
gah was forced to shoot from the outside
and started missing shots.
Pisgah's early fast pace began to show
and with six minutes left in the half, the
Centennial I team brought themselves to
within one point of their opponents, 21-20.
At the half, Pisgah led 33-28.
Despite Schwartz's 19 points in the sec-
ond half, despite Witz being pulled from
the game for four minutes because of foul
trouble, and despite Pisgah's having only
six players available (Tom Guist was in-
jured in the playoff semifinal), Pisgah dom-
inated the second half of the game. Pisgah's
outside shooting improved and Centen-
nial I began to wear down.
"We had some trouble toward the end of
the first half," Witz said. "We got fatigued
from the quick start, and then they
switched to a zone and it took us time to
adjust. In the second half' found some gaps
in the zone, and we also hit more from the
outside."

Witz, 34, played basketball for four years
at Brandeis University and was an East
Coast Athletic Conference All-American.
The rest of the champion Pisgah team
included Jeff Cohen, Michael Fishman,
Tom Jordan and Tony Purther.
In the "B" League playoffs, Keidan,
fourth seeded with a 5-5 regular season
record, beat the odds and made it to the fi-
nals by defeating the No. 1 seeded team,
Leadership III, which had finished the reg-
ular season 9-1.
In the "B" League championship game,
Robert Steinberg led the scoring for Kei-
dan with 12 points, followed by 11 from
Alan Mudryk. But David Epstein was high
scorer for the winning Brotherhood I (6-4)
with 15 points. Jared Saperstein scored 13
points and Gary Yashinsky scored 12.
The other players for Brotherhood I were
Harry Glanz, Larry Horn, David Radner
and Ron Silberstein.
Brotherhood V's defeat of Downtown-
Fox (8-2) for the "C" League championship
was a mild surprise despite its 8-2 regu-
lar-season record. At the start of the sea-
son, the team had been seeded last in the

FINAL page 66