Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer
Bolton boys basketball’s Class D state championship last weekend in Binghamton was the first for a team sport in school history, Head Coach Cody Kober said.
To pull it off, the Eagles, who finished the season 26-1, had to defeat nine-time state champ Bridgehampton 62-50 Saturday and then come back the next day for an early 10 a.m. start time to defeat Sackets Harbor 65-49.
All of it thrilled the Bolton faithful who traveled in large numbers across the state. “A ref told me ‘you guys travel real well,’” Coach Kober said. “You’re almost outnumbering people from down here. I can’t believe it. It’s crazy.”
Then there was the rousing reception and victory parade when the champions arrived back in Bolton Sunday evening.
“I haven’t seen that many people in Bolton during the winter in my whole life,” said senior Liam Foy, who notched double-doubles in both games at states, including 15 points, 13 rebounds in the title tilt.
Bolton faced adversity in the championship. At one point in the second quarter they were down by 10 points. But the Eagles maintained their composure.
“I wasn’t worried at all, because of previous games we have played,” said senior Jace Hubert, who scored 11 points Sunday and 17 points on 8-for-9 shooting Saturday. “We’ve been down before.”
He implored his teammates to “Take it one play at a time.”
Jaxon Egloff, the lone junior in a starting five otherwise full of seniors, led Bolton in scoring in both games, getting 23 points in the semifinal and 24 in the final. Senior Will Hens also made big contributions Sunday, with 13 points. Senior Jacob French was another starter for Bolton, and senior Andrew Morehouse, junior Abe Figueroa and freshman Sam Foy come off the bench.
Coach Kober, who has led the program for seven seasons and is a 2008 Bolton grad who played there himself, said the core group of players that won it all last weekend has been playing together since second grade. He said that years ago “a couple parents got together with me and said ‘We’ve got the talent here.’”
What came next was a lot of sacrifice, “bringing them all around upstate New York for travel basketball,” which culminated in last weekend’s triumph.
Hubert says, “Seeing all our families and people we’ve known for our whole lives there, who have traveled so far and put so much into us — it was great to give something back to them.”
For him, the moment of realization that this team could win it all came at the end of sophomore year. That’s when “I knew that we had a team to do it,” he recalls.
Egloff said, “We’ve been playing together for so long, we know what everybody is going to do on the court. Bigger schools don’t get that advantage.”
Foy, a SUNY Cortland football commit, said “We hang out all the time after school. I know and love every guy on the team.”
After last year’s disappointing defeat in the regional semifinals, the Eagles only graduated one senior. Foy said that going into this season “I knew we were going to be a great team that had the possibility of winning states.”
Still, after the final buzzer sounded Sunday he realized that winning it all was “something that I could never have imagined.”
“A school that has at most 180 kids just won a state championship,” Foy, who scored his 1,000th career point in the title game, said incredulously.
Egloff said “It’s amazing doing something no one in this school has ever done,” calling the experience “surreal.”
Hubert credited his team’s competitive nature for its success.
“We’ve always been super competitive, whether it be mini golf or whatever,” he said.
“You guys fight over checkers,” Coach Kober interjected.
“We just hate to lose,” Hubert concluded.
He added “I’m super proud of everybody on the team, for all the hard work and countless hours we’ve put in. It has been so much fun. There hasn’t been a single time where I’ve wished we had a day off. We practiced every time like it was our last practice.”
He said knowing his time with the team is over makes the culmination of the season “bittersweet,” but “I can’t be upset with it coming to an end like this.”
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