Recchia helps top-ranked Mars overwhelm Freeport

By: HSSN Staff
Saturday, December 8, 2018 | 11:18 PM

After Mars lost one of the WPIAL’s all-time top scorers in Robby Carmody last season, the question was who would pick up the scoring slack?

Enter Andrew Recchia.

The senior guard tallied 26 points — 20 in the first half — on an assortment of jumpers, drives and step-backs as the Planets rolled to a 94-47 championship game victory over host Freeport in the tip-off tournament final.

Augmenting the scoring was Clairton transfer Khori Fusco with 18 and center Michael Carmody scored 14 points and collected 15 rebounds for Mars, ranked No. 1 in Class 5A by TribHSSN.

“Recchia’s obviously a tremendous player,” said Planets coach Rob Carmody. “People forget about how good he was because sometimes what Robby did overshadowed him.”

Robby Carmody, last year’s Pennsylvania Gatorade Player of the Year, is at Notre Dame. He finished as one of the WPIAL’s scoring leaders with 2,378 points as Mars won the WPIAL title last year and was the PIAA runner-up.

But a key ingredient Saturday afternoon to the overwhelming victory was defense. The Planets closed driving lanes and rarely let the Yellowjackets get off an easy shot.

Spearheading the defensive effort was senior Brandon Caruso.

“We have the ability, because of our guards, to have a really good defensive team,” coach Carmody said. “Brandon Caruso does so many things that don’t show up in the stat line. Staying in front of a guy, there’s no stat for that. Making a guy go to his weak hand, there’s no stat for it and he really sets a great tone for us.”

One of Freeport’s goals when Wayne Greiser took over as coach was to toughen the nonsection schedule.

“One of the reasons we wanted them here was to beef up our schedule and get some quality opponents,” Greiser said. “They’re No. 1 in 5A for a reason. That’s our goal: get better each day, get better each quarter.”

When the 6-foot-7, 265-pound Michael Carmody had to sit with three personal fouls early in the second period, Mars just switched to a guard-oriented offense.

Down 51-24 at the half, Greiser told his team to try to win the second half. Freeport matched Mars with 16 points in the third period.

“We talked at halftime about winning the second half, about battling to the final buzzer and I thought we did that,” Greiser said. “We made a little run, cut it 17 (53-36), they still had a big lead, but we took it as a positive.”

At times, Freeport had three freshmen playing.

Garret Schaffhauser scored seven of his team-high 16 points in the third quarter for the Yellowjackets.

Recchia was the tournament MVP. Named to the all-tournament team was Fusco, Freeport’s Jalen Brown and Nolan Plocki, Burrell’s Logan Bitar and the Kiski School’s Chris Moncrief.

George Guido is a freelance writer.

Tags: Freeport, Mars