If you’re thinking about pre-gaming plenary, this is your event. Saturday afternoon. Haverford-Swat. The last basketball game of the year. The women have a chance to lock up their first ever Centennial Conference playoff birth. You know they’ll come out fired up and ready to play.
On the men’s side, we have some incredible individual storylines. No, we don’t have Jeremy Lin, but we do have his Division III equivalent: Ian Goldberg. The kid’s two points shy of hitting 1,000 points in his career, a milestone that hasn’t been reached since Brittany Lattisaw ’09 did it for the Lady Fords.
NO WAIT! THIS JUST IN! Cam Baker is only 5 points shy of 1,000!! So YOU’RE telling ME that we will likely have TWO 1,000 MILESTONES reached in the SAME GAME?!?! The LAST GAME?!?! At SWAT?!?! This is truely a must-see Division III Centennial Conference matchup. Who cares that the men are eliminated from the playoffs. IT’S SWAT. Let’s get out there and support both teams.
This game means a lot. Don’t believe me? Check out what Lekan Nicholson ’11 had to say about it:
My reflection on past swag games
The Swat game meant everything to me for my haverford basketball experience, for I remember dreaming about playing in it before I even got to Ford. The best part of the swat game was always the amount of fans that showed up, I wish it was like that every game, but I’ll take it for two games out of the season, having everyone there cheering us on made me feel like I was a part of something bigger than myself, every shot was a big deal, every movement felt different than other games, and a the excitement I felt was like nothing else I’ve experienced.
I knew how much the game meant to my fellow Haverfordians after we played swat my freshman year, Valdison Pina and I walked into a 14 basement party, after we won, and as we walked through the door, the music stopped and everyone applauded us, WE DIDN’T EVEN PLAY!!! LOL!!!
My junior year was the first time I got real minutes for the game, I was so nervous and excited for the game. During the game 1st half, right before the halftime buzzer sounded, I hit a 3 to kill swats run to end the half. I will never forget that feeling of my teammates jumping on me, Matt Palmer running down the sideline pumping his fist, me slapping Cam’s hand incredibly hard, and the fans exploding, I’m sure people walking their dogs on Ardmore Ave could hear the screams. For the next week I had people coming up to me telling me how great the shot was, and it such a great feeling for me that our fans cared about the game, just as much as us, and that they’d take the time out of their day to say something to us about it.
Another great swat game memory for me was my senior game, shout out to 2011, for I got to watch my boy A-Train do his thing, I never been so happy for a teammate, like I was in that game.
Good luck to the boys on Wednesday, I know they’re going to handle business, keep the streak going This is a serious game so PARTY, NO PARTY, WE TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS AND THEN WE PARTY. SWAT SUCKS!!!!!