Camden High School Wins a Tainted Title

The Camden Panthers have won the 2024 New Jersey Group 2 state basketball championship, beating Newark Arts High School by a score of 69-50. When those young men raised the trophy at Jersey Mike’s Arena on the Rutgers University campus, it would ordinarily concern nobody residing outside the Garden State. But this was different, resulting as it did from one of the ugliest chapters in New Jersey high school sports history. CHS’s title merits a major asterisk because something very strange happened in their semifinal game against Manasquan High School on March 5. It was played at Central Regional High School in Berkeley Township.

Before proceeding, I must point out that all the players for CHS are black and all those for MHS are White—same thing for the head coaches, Maalik Wayns and Andrew Bilodeau.

A Camden player’s free throw put his team ahead, 46-45, with just over five seconds left. The Warriors’ Rey Weinseimer hustled the ball upcourt and took a long, off-balance shot from the right sideline that bounced off the rim. But teammate Griffin Linstra was in just the right spot. He caught the rebound and put it up and in just before the buzzer went off. In fact, there was half a second remaining when the ball left his hand. MHS had won, 47-46, as the referee with the best view signaled it good. Of course, the Manasquan players, cheerleaders and fans jumped for joy. The Camden guys were dismayed to have lost but appeared to have accepted it. Since the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association has no mechanism for overturning the results of a game, that game between the Panthers and Warriors was over.

The three referees (one White, two black) had begun to walk off the court, but they were confronted by Wayns, his assistants and some other unidentified individuals. Refusing to capitulate, they belligerently insisted the basket should not count. The refs huddled but did not consult the video which would have shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that Linstra’s put-back was good. In contravention of the NJSIAA bylaws, they waved off the basket and sent Camden to the state title game in Piscataway.

“I still don’t know what happened,’’ Bilodeau said later. “I wish I could tell you. The basket was ruled good. It’s clear to see on the video. The place erupts. The [NJSIAA] official on site meets with the three officials. I don’t know what took place. They just said, ‘No basket, game over.’… Those three guys huddled up and they screwed these 15 kids in front of 1,000 people, and that video will be on the Internet for everyone to see. These guys beat Camden’s ass in front of everyone in this gym and everyone on TV. They are a heck of a team, but we outplayed them tonight and everybody saw it. God bless you all.”

By no means was it over. The Manasquan people, with support from many others in the hoops community, called on Camden to do the honorable and just thing by forfeiting the bogus victory. Wayns and his players feigned innocence and were quoted as saying that they had won fair and square. What, they seemed to ask, was all this hullabaloo?

The NJSIAA issued an apology the morning after the game, admitting that Linstra’s shot was good and that the wrong team was advancing. Dr. Frank Kasyan, the Manasquan superintendent of schools, attempted to file suit in the New Jersey Superior Court Chancery Division, but the judge refused to give injunctive relief and delay the title game. He directed the issue to the state Department of Education, but that too, went nowhere. An attorney representing the Camden school district, Lou Cappelli Jr., predictably stated that Manasquan’s legal battle was sour grapes, a waste of taxpayer money and the court’s time.

When the Camden and Newark schools met in the championship game, who do you think was in attendance? Showing impressive maturity and sportsmanship, the entire Manasquan basketball squad was there to watch and—rather glumly, I will admit—clap for the Panthers when they prevailed. Bilodeau, too, took the high road. He said the Camden players themselves were blameless in the fiasco and that they deserve to be called state champs.

Ever since Wayns et al. did their black-macho thing with the refs, the media has been scrupulous in avoiding any reference to race. In this day of DEI, the black national anthem and other forms of “progressive” social change, people must toggle back and forth between color-blindness and hypersensitivity to race and ethnicity.

Finally, please be advised that not only was this the 13th state championship (and second in three years) in CHS history, but the school’s basketball program has been repeatedly sanctioned for on-court violence and shady recruiting practices; its best players (Billy Richmond and Alijah Curry, who hit what turned out to be the winning free throw) are imports from Memphis, Tennessee.

Physical assaults on referees are more and more common these days, and the three who handled the Manasquan-Camden game had to know it. By pretending that Linstra’s shot came after the buzzer, they played it safe. Perhaps you wonder why the Panthers did not win the state title in 2023, as they did in 2022 and now, in 2024. I will tell you. They were barred from the NJSIAA playoffs last year after they brawled with an opponent in the Camden County Tournament.

Linstra makes WINNING shot…

Tears for the Warriors…

CHS fans celebrate a stolen victory…

A disbelieving Manasquan coach Andrew Bilodeau asks one of the refs how this travesty was possible…