New York: Christ the King proves double trouble on the court

But a funny thing happened. CHSAA schools would win the large-school class nine times in the next two decades, but CTK was always MIA from that list despite multiple close calls along the way.

That season also marked a turning point for the Christ the King girls program. August Martin would win the Federation large-school class in 1989, but the Lady Royals were 24-2 and pushing both the nearby Falcons and Staten Island St. Peter’s for supremacy in New York City.

The breakthrough came the following year as underclassmen Nakia Hill and Darlene Saar supplied the inside muscle and Debbie Hemery ran the offense en route to the first of a staggering 11 straight championships in New York’s version of a tournament of champions to conclude the season.

Times eventually changed, though. It’s almost laughable since the CTK girls would win in Glens Falls three more times in the next nine seasons, but the perception was that the Royals had slipped at the advent of the the 21st Century. The PSAL’s Murry Bergtraum won five crowns in seven years and St. Michael Academy captured the 2009 championship, and both began this season more highly regarded.

Oh, there were always stellar players in the gym and you could be sure that the boys and girls teams at the Queens school would play quality ball over the years, but the pieces just never came together for Christ the King the way some had expected.

And then, suddenly, they caught lightning in a bottle. Though many schools had qualified both a boys and girls team for the Federation tournament semifinals in the previous 28 years, CTK was this year’s intriguing bet to pull off an unprecedented sweep.

"This was a chance to be elite," second-year boys coach Joe Arbitello was saying Sunday in the hallway beneath the Glens Falls Civic Center stands.

On Saturday, the girls edged Bergtraun 73-67 and the boys fought off Albany CBA 63-60. On Sunday, Bria Edwards scored 23 points and paced the girls past Sachem East 56-47, then sophomore Omar Calhoun accounted for 20 points as the boys downed Brooklyn’s Boys & Girls 52-49.

It was history in the making.

"It's a big, big deal," Arbitello said. "It was an incredible weekend for Christ The King. We played the whole year with maturity and composure."

And it was a big deal for reasons that go beyond winning trophies and cutting down nets.

A distressing story had been simmering on the back burner since just before the 2008-09 season, beginning with Oliva’s resignation as boys coach, purportedly for medical reasons. Shortly beforehand, sex abuse allegations against the highly regarded coach has surfaced.

Slowly, more revelations emerged and sentiment toward Oliva started to shift from complete support to a degree of skepticism even by some formerly close associates. And though Oliva, who possessed a 549-131 record and four CHSAA intersectional titles, was no longer associated with the team – Arbitello tacked coaching duties onto his own role as athletic director – the school’s name appeared prominently in stories and headlines every time there was a new development in the investigation over the past two seasons.

The angst peaked the day before the Christ the King squads boarded the bus to travel to Glens Falls, with news that a Massachusetts grand jury had indicted Oliva on two counts of rape of a child dating back to 1976. Oliva has steadfastly denied the charges from the start.

Remaining connections between Oliva and CTK were tenuous at best – he had coached only one current player – but the school needed something to move the story forward, and the Royals provided it with their Federation sweep.

And there is a genuine forward-looking storyline to follow now. Though Arbitello is going to have some rebuilding to do, he’ll have Cahoun and T.J. Curry back in the starting lineup plus get back point guard Corey Edwards, who missed the playoff run with a dislocated ankle.

And then there’s the girls team. Bob Mackey has been an assistant to legend Vinny Cannizaro or the head coach on CTK teams reaching Glens Falls 20 times in 29 years. The Federation tournament moves to Albany next winter, and he probably needs to assume he’ll be traveling again that weekend.

He started two sophomores and two juniors over the weekend, and the Royals beat both St. Michael Academy and Murry Bergtraum last month to re-establish the upper hand on the Big Apple hoops landscape.

"It's not about revenge. It's not about St. Michael or Bergtraum," Mackey said. "We have been planning on this since we set up the schedule last year."

The Royals showed up both rested and loose, but they also had their eye on the prize. Beating Bergtraum would have set off a monumental party by many teams, but the CTK celebration on the next-to-last day of the season was muted; there was still another game to be played.

"(That) was a semifinal in a tournament," Mackey said. "There was no need to dance up and down on the floor. That's not what we came here for. We beat a very good team and the girls were excited about it. We did not need to celebrate."

That could wait one more day.

St. Michael Academy finally ran into a foe it could not overcome: dwindling enrollment. The Manhattan girls school announced last week that it will close in June after 136 years for financial reasons.

The Eagles basketball team has been one of the nation’s best for much of the last decade under coach Apache Paschall. They won their first Federation large-school title last winter and this year’s team featured McDonald’s All-American Jennifer O’Neill, who is headed to Kentucky, and South Carolina recruit Brittany Webb.

Cathedral and St. Jean Baptiste high schools have offered to take the displaced students and incoming freshmen, and Jennifer Maxon, the SMA athletic director, said the plan right now is to let all of the basketball returnees migrate to one school if the desire to do so. A school spokesman said fundraising has increased in recent years, but a decrease in foundation funding and tuition payments led to economic struggles.