LITCHFIELD – One of the best rivalries in the Riverbend headed north on Friday as the Marquette Catholic Explorers and Roxana Shells met on the hardwood in the semifinals of the 2026 Rick McGraw Memorial Boys’ Basketball Invitational.
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Roxana had to overcome a slow start, but would go on to win 39-35, advancing to the tournament championship game for the first time since 2013.
“That’s what our kids do,” Roxana assistant coach Gerry Wheaton said postgame. “We have three seniors and two juniors, and they play a lot. They enjoy playing basketball together, they know what it means to our program. These kids, they’re resilient, they’ve been through everything.”
Wheaton took over for head coach Mark Briggs who had to miss Friday’s game as he was being inducted into the SIUE Athletics Hall of Fame for his stellar collegiate baseball career from 1995-98.
“That man, I’ve been his assistant for 13 years. He puts full faith in our staff, our kids,” Wheaton said regarding his head coach.
“I didn’t have much to do with this one,” Wheaton said with a laugh. “This was a gritty performance by our kids. We really challenged them after the way they played defense against Litchfield. Tonight, they showed up defensively.”
“I know Briggsy was getting updates from probably everybody in the gym tonight,” Wheaton said, “so he probably wasn’t too thrilled the first couple minutes.”
If Briggs was checking his phone during the SIUE Hall of Fame ceremony, no, he probably wasn’t too pleased with the early updates.
That’s because Marquette came out the gates hot, jumping out to a 10-0 lead, maintaining a 12-2 advantage after the first quarter.
Back-to-back baskets from Cam Jones and Chase Jones to open the second quarter widened the margin to 16-2, Marquette’s largest lead of the night. The Shells ended the half on a 6-2 run, cutting the Marquette lead to 18-8.
Cam Jones nailed a three to make it 21-9 before Roxana woke up.
Keelan Crawford answered with the first of seven second-half threes.
Marquette led 25-14 before the Shells closed the third quarter on a 13-2 blitz that tied the game up at 27. Roxana got two threes from Cohen Dugan and another from Crawford during that run, along with a pair of free throws from both Sean Maberry and Crawford.
“I didn’t panic; our coaching staff did not panic,” Wheaton said. “The kids, we had to settle them down, and then end of the third quarter, everyone got hyped up, but I had to explain to them it was 0-0.”
Not for long.
Dugan drilled another three to give his team a 30-27 lead, right before Chase Jones tied it back up with a trey of his own.
Out of a timeout with just over five minutes to go, Crawford connected on another three-pointer that made it 33-30. From there, Roxana held on to that lead, making enough free throws in the end to get the win.
“This was all them,” Wheaton said. “They executed when they needed to, hit free throws again when they were supposed to. That was a good high school basketball game.”
Dugan and Crawford both finished with 13 points, but it was arguably Dugan’s performance that shined the brightest, mainly because of the game-tying three at the end of the third quarter.
“Dugan can be an elite shooter when he gets his feet set and when he’s doing it in rhythm,” Wheaton said. “There’re times where he can get a little deep on his shot, but he’s never not open. So, he’s always shooting with confidence. You know the ball is going to go in eventually because of how confident he is. Our kids did a nice job of getting him open and those were massive shots tonight.”
Maberry ended up with six points, Trenton Hollaway had four, and Aiden Stemm had three.
“We knew that they’re a team that’s capable of making a bunch of threes in a hurry, and we’re not,” Marquette head coach Steve Medford said. “We’re a more methodical team that’s going to try and defend you and rebound the basketball. We just couldn’t put the ball in the hole at times.”
“[Roxana] played well in the second half, hats off to them,” Medford continued. “We’ve had this, we can’t put four quarters together right now, that’s been our biggest issue. We get one or two nice quarters and then we have a bit of a lapse for a little bit.”
Marquette was led by Chase and Cam Jones who each scored 14 points. Jack Rea added five. Marquette, which fell to 15-5 on the season, will take on Taylorville (10-10) in the third-place game on Saturday, January 24 at 9 a.m.
Meanwhile, the Shells will try and prevent the Triad Knights from running away with a fourth straight Rick McGraw title, meeting them in the championship game at 10:30 a.m.
But both teams agreed that this probably isn’t the end of the Marquette-Roxana saga.
“These two programs, I think come back in a month and you’ll see us battling it out at our place for a regional championship game in a packed house again for the umpteenth time,” Wheaton said.
Roxana won an earlier meeting this season back on December 2, by a score of 51-42. The teams could, and more than likely will, meet in their correlated IHSA Class 2A regional, one that Roxana gets to host in late February.
“If there’s a time to lose to them, this is the time to do it,” Medford said. “When it comes regionals, that’s a team that’s probably going to have to be reckoned with.”
