Grantham, PA — Junior
Tyler Ritzman made one basket Wednesday night.
It may have been the biggest of his life.
The 6-2 guard buried a 22-foot three pointer with just 1.2 seconds remaining in regulation, helping Messiah knock off arch rival Elizabethtown College by a 61-60 score — all in front of a chaotic house of 1,872 frenzied spectators.
Many of those rushed the floor following the Blue Jays' ensuing inbounds pass, an act that was broken up by seniors Jamie Yoder and Kyle Snyder as the final horn sounded.
“It was quite a scene,” Messiah head coach Rick Van Pelt said of the mad mobbing afterward. “This couldn't have happened to a better group of guys. I'm happy for them.”
Happy may not have described Van Pelt's mood just moments before Ritzman's cash in, as Messiah (12-7, 5-4) struggled mightily to get on top of E'Town — a squad that led the majority of Wednesday's clash. After a three-pointer from junior Josh Hartman gave the Falcons a 41-40 lead with 14:22 to play in the contest, Elizabethtown (13-6, 5-4) went on an 11-6 run, taking a 51-45 lead with 10:43 to play.
Messiah wouldn't sniff a tie score until under a minute remained, as back-to-back threes from Yoder and Hartman turned a 58-52 E'Town lead into a 58-58 deadlock — also turning Brubaker Auditorium into a virtual insane asylum.
As Messiah's student section went berserk, so did the free throw shooting abilities of the Blue Jays: E'Town's Mike Church made just one of two and, following a miss from Hartman on Messiah's next possession, the Blue Jays' Joe Flanagan did the same.
The result was only a 60-58 lead for E'Town with 15 seconds to play.
Following a rebound from Kyle Snyder on Flanagan's miss, Van Pelt called a timeout.
“(The ball) ended up in the exact spot we wanted it,” Van Pelt would later say of the play that led to Ritzman's dagger. “It wasn't pretty, but the play was run exactly the way it was designed. (Tyler) didn't have a very clean catch, so it wasn't a pure jump shot.”
He paused.
“But shooting the basketball is what Tyler Ritzman is good at.”
Yoder inbounded the ball to freshman Chris Yoder from near the midcourt line following the timeout, a pass that an extending E'Town defense forced into the backcourt.
Chris Yoder then got control and appeared to look for Jamie Yoder on the right side, but the Blue Jays' switching defense took that option away. Instead, he swung the ball to Ritzman on the left wing, as the clock ticked under five seconds.
Ritzman bobbled the pass at first, but then collected the ball, using a swift left-to-right cross over dribble to free himself up for a deep — and contested — three ball.
His shot came directly in front of the Messiah bench, and Van Pelt was directly behind him.
“It looked dead on, but all of Tyler's shots are dead on,” Van Pelt said. “If he misses, it's never to the left or right. He's always on target. If he's going to miss, it's going to be short or long.”
Ritzman's attempt was neither.
The ball splashed through the net with just 1.2 seconds on the clock — a precise moment that produced ear-piercing decibel levels inside Brubaker Auditorium.
It was Ritzman's first basket of the game, in only his second attempt, after playing just 10 minutes.
Up to that point, Ritzman's stat line read 0-1 from the field, four fouls and two turnovers.
“Tyler is a pure shooter,” Van Pelt said, dismissing the fact that the Millerstown, Pa. native may not have been 'feeling it' on this particular evening. “He's as good of a shooter as we've ever had in our program, and we've had some good ones. I mean, in a way, I'm not sure there are any nerves in a shot like that. You either make it or you don't. It's not like it's a free throw, where you have a lot of time to think about it.”
Ritzman's jumper was a thing of beauty, as Elizabethtown could only call timeout in an effort to set up some type of last-ditch, full-court hook-up for a second miracle.
The Blue Jays succeeded in getting a 90-foot baseball pass to Mike Church, but he caught the ball with his momentum going away from the basket, and could only flip the ball over his head as time expired.
The ensuing scene was one of chaos, as Messiah students rushed the floor, engulfing Ritzman in a sea of white shirts and rally towels.
“It's kind of funny, but we had a team devotional this week, and we talked about The Book of Esther, and how God placed Esther in the palace for such a time as this,” Van Pelt said, putting emphasis on the main point of the passage. “I guess that tonight was Tyler Ritzman's time.”
It nearly was not Messiah's. E'Town opened up an eight-point lead midway through the first half and extended it to 11 points late, a difference that was trimmed to a 34-26 margin at halftime behind a late three pointer from Chris Yoder.
Still, the Blue Jays withstood every Falcons' push until the bitter end, turning a pair of one-point Messiah leads back to six-point advantages of their own on four different occasions in the second half.
Van Pelt said the difference was in Messiah's ability to control the glass and limit turnovers in the second period, as the Falcons committed 10 of their 16 giveaways in the first 20 minutes — allowing seven of E'Town's 10 offensive rebounds during that time as well.
“The first half, they killed us on the boards, they got out in transition and we turned the ball over,” he said. “In the second half, we gave up just three offensive rebounds and turned it over only six times. That limited what they were able to do in transition. It was a tale of two halves, very similar to our first game (this year) at their place. Tonight, we did to them what they were able to do to us.”
E'Town roared back from a 16-point second-half deficit to claim a 69-64 overtime win at Thompson Gymnasium on Dec. 5, a game that sparked a seven-game winning streak for the Blue Jays.
Wednesday night, however, it was Messiah's turn to end a pair of streaks, snapping a two-game winning push from E'Town while snipping a two-game losing skid of its own.
“We talked to our guys before the game,” Van Pelt said. “If tonight's game was a beauty contest, toughness would be a category. E'Town plays so hard, they play so tough, they fly around, going to the boards … we needed to win the judges' scores in the toughness department. I thought we showed just enough.”
Jamie Yoder led all scorers on the evening, finishing with 20 points on five of 12 shooting, going eight for 10 from the charity stripe. Snyder finished with 12 points and 10 rebounds — his fourth double-double of the season — while Hartman and Chris Yoder each finished with nine.
Perhaps the most goosebump-inducing stat — for Messiah fans, anyway — was Ritzman's line: A meager three points on one of two shooting from the floor.
It was not Ritzman's first brush with last-second greatness, however, as he canned a baseline jumper with .01 remaining to give the Falcons a 57-55 win over Williamson Trade School in the Messiah/Hampton Inn Invitational back on Dec. 12.
Wednesday's opponent was not Williamson Trade, and the game certainly had more meaning than an early-season weekend tournament.
With the latest win, Messiah helped create a three-way tie for third in the Commonwealth Conference standings, with second and first place sitting just a game and two away, respectively.
“It's the same every year,” Van Pelt said of the league standings. “It's a jumbled, bumbled mess. You can't really worry about it.”
What Van Pelt and company will worry about next is Alvernia University, as the Falcons will visit the first-year Commonwealth member Saturday afternoon in Reading, Pa. The Crusaders are among those tied with a 5-4 league record, making Saturday's 3 p.m. tilt yet another high-implication battle.
Not that the Falcons will go to bed tonight thinking about that.
“This was a good one for the guys,” Van Pelt said. “We kind of hit a wall this past week, with the whole Penn State-York game, at Widener Saturday. It happens to a lot of teams. Our guys hadn't had as much fun over the past week as they'd have liked to. This will get us excited about coming back to practice. It keeps us in the hunt. That's always exciting.”
