Kennedy’s Isis Alonso had two huge 3s in the second quarter. (Damion Reid)
Shaquaya Daniels won’t deny where she came from. She grew up a streetballer and remains one now.
“I was in the park every day,” the John F. Kennedy junior point guard said. “You walk by a park, I’ll be there.”
The George Washington transfer has worked so hard to adjust her game to organized hoops. But Daniels had to bring a little street out Tuesday night.
With 16.3 seconds left, the tiny sprite spun in the lane, sunk a left-handed layup and got fouled. Then she sprinted to the free throw line, jumped up and pumped her first. Daniels converted the 3-point play and finished with her best performance of the season – 22 points – as No. 3 John F. Kennedy beat No. 7 Manhattan Center, 72-50, in the PSAL Class AA girls basketball semifinals at St. John’s University.
The Knights will meet No. 1 Murry Bergtraum in the championship game at Madison Square Garden on Saturday at 11 a.m. In just a few months, Daniels has gone from GW to MSG.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to sleep.”
Daniels’ emergence has coincided with Kennedy’s. At the beginning of the season, Daniels was ineligible and then a turnover waiting to happen, especially in her first game – coincidentally against Manhattan Center. Teammate Chelsea Custodio called her “a dribblehead.”
Hard work changed her and has gotten Kennedy (20-8) to the Garden. The Knights were a long shot to have a great season early in the year, especially with a team made up mostly of sophomores.
“In the beginning of the year, I didn’t expect these kids to come together like they did,” coach O’Neil Glenn said. “This wasn’t an easy road.”
Glenn has guided his team to the semifinals five years in a row, but the bulk of this current group had never played meaningful minutes on a big stage. There were also no big stars like Kennedy has had in the past, no Tatyiana McMorris or Danay Collier or Niki Avery.
“To me, that’s more important than anything else,” Glenn said.
The coach had to calm down his troops a little bit after the first quarter. Manhattan Center (16-11) led, 13-6, and looked like the superior team for the first eight minutes. But by halftime, Kennedy had a 29-24 lead, courtesy of a pair of 3-pointers by Isis Alonso. In the third quarter, the Knights used a 10-0 run, capped by a Daniels layup, to pull away, 39-26, with 4:48 left.
All Kennedy did the entire game was attack, attack, attack. The Knights shot 45 free throws to the Lady Rams’ 19. JFK outscored Center, 43-26, in the second half. Custodio had 12 points and Leshauna Phinazee added 10. Aziza Patterson led the Lady Rams with 28 points, but no one else was in double figures.
“On Sunday, we did a drill for 40 minutes just going to the hole,” Glenn said.
That’s Daniels’ forte. But her game now has so much more structure. It was hard at times, she said. Glenn – as he’s known to be – was very hard on her.
“Many days, I went home and cried,” Daniels said. “But he told me, if you quit now you’re going to quit in life.”
Glenn said he could always see the flashes of her ability in practice. She just needed to get the street – most of it anyway – out of her game.
“Thinking about Glenn, all that yelling and screaming, but what he says works … he’s a genius,” Daniels said. “If you think about what he says and do it, it works.”
It’s hard to argue with the results.
“We started at the bottom of the list,” Kennedy senior Jazzarae Campbell said, “and now we’re going to the Garden.”
