Fox Chapel gets clean slate in rematch with North Hills for WPIAL Class 6A title

By: George Guido
Friday, March 4, 2022 | 6:36 PM

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December 11 wasn’t that long ago in chronological terms.

But in WPIAL basketball terms, it’s been a while.

Fox Chapel and North Hills met in a tip-off tournament final that night, and North Hills convincingly defeated the Foxes, 87-57. But coaches of both boys basketball teams feel plenty of water has flowed through Pine Creek since that outing 83 days ago.

“Games in December, especially that first weekend, you play Friday night and you turn around (Saturday),” North Hills coach Buzz Gabos said. “There’s no prep, you just come out and play. That could have easily gone the other way. You don’t know. That morning, you get up and come in and just hope.”

Fox Chapel coach Zach Skrinjar agreed.

“You can look at past film, but they’re a very different team than previous years,” Skrinjar said. “You can look at tendencies. But now you have 24 games on tape, you’re going to be able to see a lot more footage of them.”

Fox Chapel (23-1) and North Hills (24-0) will meet for the WPIAL Class 6A boys title at 7 p.m. Saturday at Petersen Events Center.

The Foxes will be chasing the school’s first basketball title since 1977. North Hills is looking for its first championship. The Indians lost the 2016 Class 4A final to Pine-Richland, 73-50, in the last game played under the old Quad-A format.

Fox Chapel knocked off Beaver Falls, 50-46, in the 1977 title game at the old Civic Arena. The Foxes lost the 1988 title game to Norwin and the 1998 final to New Castle.

Fox Chapel qualified for this year’s title game with a 37-32 win over Central Catholic on Tuesday night.

The Foxes have had the ability to close out games this season, and the win over Central Catholic was one in which Fox Chapel outscored the Vikings, 8-0, in the final 58 seconds.

“That’s what we practice all season for, to be put in situations and practice games on the line,” Skrinjar said. “I think in the last few games, we’ve been able to execute in crunch time.”

There wasn’t a crunch time earlier when North Hills scored 55 points in the first half against Fox Chapel. It was so out of the norm considering the Foxes played 17 games this season in which they allowed 55 point of less.

Again, that was then, this is now.

It got away from them a little bit,” Gabos said. “They haven’t lost since, so it obviously wasn’t that big of a deal.”

North Hills is led by 6-foot-7 sophomore Royce Parham, averaging 21 points per game. Over many decades, scholastic sports stories have involved sons of fathers who had great careers. In Parham’s case, his mother, Kim Calhoun, was one of the WPIAL’s top players while at Penn Hills.

Indians senior guard Alex Smith averages 18 points.

The Foxes are led by all-time scorer Eli Yofan, who has 1,534 career points.

“It’s crazy, it’s going to be awesome when we’re there,” said Yofan of the long-awaited final trip. “Hopefully, we’ll come out on the positive side.”

Sharpsburg, a predecessor school of Fox Chapel, won the WPIAL Class B basketball title in 1941 with a 41-39 overtime victory over Bentleyville, now part of the Bentworth School District.

Tags: Fox Chapel, North Hills