Woodbridge’s Wacky Trap Defense Puts Clamp on Villa Park

Woodbridge boys’ basketball Coach John Halagan says he doesn’t like to add too many new wrinkles during the playoffs. But in the third quarter of Saturday’s 56-50 victory over Villa Park in the Southern Section Division II-AA final, he put in one of the wackiest defenses he could think of--and it worked.

Villa Park, led by 7-foot-1 All-American center Eric Chenowith, pretty much had its way with the Warriors in the first half at the Pond, taking a 24-19 lead.

In the locker room, Halagan reasoned that the Warriors, who shot a dismal four for 25 from the field, needed to pick up the tempo, get some layups and deny Chenowith the ball around the basket, where he scored all of his 12 first-half points.

To do that, Halagan concocted an odd-looking trap that resembled a sloppy 1-3-1 zone, an alignment that caused guard William Stovall to chuckle as he discussed it.

“It was a man defense, but once the ball went to the wings it was a zone,” Stovall said.

Using the “man-wing” defense, Stovall and teammate Peter Martinelli created several turnovers and converted the opportunities into baskets. When Chenowith was trapped into a traveling call with 6 minutes 44 seconds left in the quarter, Woodbridge forward Brandon Beeson wasted little time feeding Stovall at the other end for a layin and a 25-24 lead. A couple of timeouts and a 13-2 run later, the Spartans trailed, 34-26, and were still trying to figure out what hit them.

“One thing no one talks about is how well they defend [the ball],” Villa Park Coach Kevin Reynolds said. “Everyone talks about what they can do on the offensive side of the floor and about their up-tempo system, but we just didn’t have enough people to step up to that kind of pressure.”

Halagan was criticized heavily last season for letting Woodbridge, with just about the same players, stumble in the quarterfinals of the playoffs against Riverside J.W. North. And as his team’s first-half performance began to wear on him, Halagan wasn’t sure what to do to turn things around.

His All-American, 6-10 forward Chris Burgess, who finished with 17 points, was struggling with a three-for-10 shooting performance. Even the man-wing failed.

“We tried to run that defense two or three times in the first half and we just botched it,” he said.

But once the Warriors got the hang of it, it saved them.

“That trapping defense just threw us out of rhythm,” said guard Isaiah Cavaco, who finished with 15 points and was the only player to figure out how to split the defense with slashing drives. “If you look at the number of touches that Eric had on the ball in the third quarter, you can see that they were way down.”