MENDHAM — Ask Lia Manuel about eclipsing 1,000 points for her high school basketball
career, and she’ll shrug and say, “It was pretty cool.” But then ask the senior guard how much
she enjoys averaging more than five assists per game—especially her bread-and-butter
baseball outlet passes to junior teammate Halle Ferrara—and her face lights up.
“I just like to get everyone involved,” Manuel said after she and her Mendham High School
teammates suffered their first hoops loss of the season, 50-43, at Scotch Plains-Fanwood
Saturday, Dec. 23 in an inter-conference battle of unbeatens. “I enjoy that even more than
scoring. And Halle and I work on those plays every day in practice.”
“Lia is such a competitor and she has the ability to take over a game,” said Mendham head
coach Hilary Milner. “She could have gone to a private school—they all wanted her—but she
prefers to stay and play with her friends, and that’s just one of the things I like most about her.”
Manuel, now averaging 18.8 points per game including a 16-point effort in Saturday’s game
against the Raiders (4-0), had scored 78 points in the Minutemen’s first four games, including a
season-high 30 in a 23-point victory over Ridge. And she has missed only two free throws so far this season.
All-around Athlete
The senior all-around athlete, who’ll be playing soccer at Murray State next year, eclipsed 1,000 points for her hoops career with a 17-point performance at Morris Knolls on Monday, Dec. 18. It was the first of four games in the week, and the loss to Scotch Plains was the fourth, for Mendham, now 5-1 coming off a sectional championship game appearance last season.
Manuel now has 1,040 points in her three years and five games playing varsity, including a
freshman season cut short by the COVID-19 shutdown.
Fittingly, Manuel’s initial play against Scotch Plains-Fanwood was an assist as she dished the ball to Ferrara, whose layup gave Mendham a 2-0 lead. Ferrara, who scored eight of her 10 points in the first half, also hit a bucket to break a 9-0 Raiders run later in the first quarter and scored the last points of the period—off a long outlet pass from Manuel, of course—to send the two teams off the court tied, 11-11.
Keosky stars, then falls Junior Sophia Keoskey powered a huge Minutemen surge in the second quarter, scoring all nine of her points as Mendham outscored the hosts, 17-5, in the quarter to lead by 12 at the half.
When Manuel and Ferrara each dropped in a pair of free throws early in the third quarter, the
Minutemen had their biggest lead of the game, 32-18. But moments later, off Mendham’s third
turnover of the quarter (it had 13 for the game), Keoskey went down with left ankle injury, and
the complexion of the game changed completely.
“That hurt us,” said Manuel. “Sophia is a big part of our offense; teams have to guard her when
she moves from inside to outside because she can shoot so well.”
From that moment, which occurred with 6:12 left in the third quarter, Scotch Plains outscored
Mendham by a 32-11 count the rest of the afternoon. It began with a 12-0 run that even a pair
of timeout calls from Milner couldn’t stop.
‘We let it slip away’ Manuel ended the run with a driving one-hander to boost Mendham’s lead to four, then extended it to six points with a pair of free throws. But the Minutemen went scoreless over the next several minutes, straddling the third and fourth quarters, until Manuel’s pull-up jumper pulled her team to within two at 40-38 with 3:40 left in the fourth.
Sophomore Amelia Eichman buried a three-pointer that had the Mendham fans on their feet
and her team within a point at 42-41, but that was as close as the Minutemen would get.
“We let it slip away,” said Manuel, “and it went downhill so fast.”
“After four games this week, we were tired down the stretch,” said Milner. “You could see it in
our shots; a lot were coming up short. But as I said to the girls, we’re 5-1 before Christmas.
That’s a pretty good start to the season.”