’20 Ace Baldwin talks team success and stepping up as a leader
The St. Frances Panthers finished the regular season with a 30-5 overall record playing a national schedule. They traveled up and down to the east coast and played against some of the top players in the country, earning wins against…
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Continue ReadingThe St. Frances Panthers finished the regular season with a 30-5 overall record playing a national schedule. They traveled up and down to the east coast and played against some of the top players in the country, earning wins against just about every team they played. In their regular season finale, they faced off against conference rival Mt. St. Joe. The Gaels accounted for one of their four losses at the time, and when the final buzzer sounded, they escaped with another win to steal the top seed in the MIAA Playoffs from the Panthers.
“We looked at the film from that game and saw all that we did wrong,” Ace Baldwin told Prep Hoops. “We were excited as a team to fix it during practice so that we would be ready for the playoffs.”
They definitely fixed their issues. Following the loss against Mt. St. Joe, they defeated Annapolis Area Christian 104-64 in the opening round of the playoffs. At halftime of that game, St. Frances only held a three point lead. They proceeded to score 60 points in the final 16 minutes to run away with the game.
Following the win against Annapolis Area, they’d advance to play Boys’ Latin in the semifinals, the same team that eliminated them in last year’s playoffs. From the opening tip, St. Frances looked like a team on a mission and left with an emphatic 81-47 win.
Baldwin had his hands all over this game. The 6-foot guard lead his team with 21 points that included six three-pointers. Time after time, Baldwin would break his defender down off the dribble and once his defender was off balance, he’d rise up and let it fly.
Scoring is something that Baldwin has shown before, but there have been a few extremely important aspects of his game that have improved drastically this season. One of those aspects is his ability to lock in defensively. In the game against Mt. St. Joe, he demanded to guard LSU commit James Bishop, one of the best scorers in the country. Baldwin was fighting through screens, locating him quickly and doing whatever he could to make Bishop’s life hard. Bishop finished with 14 points in total, eight of which came in the fourth quarter when St. Frances had to result to fouling.
In the most recent game, Baldwin yet again elected to guard the other team’s best perimeter player. Loyola commit Cam Spencer has been lighting up the league for Boys’ Latin this season. In their semifinal match up, Baldwin came out and defended with purpose by denying Spencer as soon as the ball crossed half court. Spencer finished with 18 points, but similar to Bishop, it was a very difficult 18 points that included a ton of ball screens to free up space from Baldwin’s pressure.
In today’s game, you just don’t see a team’s best player take on the responsibility of guarding the opposition’s top scorer. Doing this exerts a ton of energy and many players want to save that energy for the offensive end. Baldwin is about winning, not his stats, and that leads to the next aspect that he has improved on: leadership.
“This year I just felt that being a leader was a huge role,” Baldwin said. “We lost a lot of our senior leaders last year, so the coaching staff was on me about stepping up and filling that role, I told them I got them.”
Baldwin and St. Frances will get their third stab at Mt. St. Joe tomorrow afternoon, but this time the MIAA A Conference title is on the line. If they plan on being the team hoisting the trophy after the final buzzer sounds, Baldwin will have to keep up his high level of play on both ends of the floor.