SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — Between playing at a small school and Marin County’s relative obscurity in the Bay Area basketball scene, Branson’s Semetri Carr often slips under the radar during discussions of the best freshmen in the area.
He certainly put himself in the spotlight on Thursday night.
Facing St. Francis in the second round of the state CIF Northern Regional Division II playoffs, Carr erupted for 21 points in the first half and finished with a game-high 27 as the Bulls downed the Lancers, 54-43.
“You see the ball go through the hoop once and you feel like you can hit anything after that,” said Carr, who hit five 3-pointers in the first 14 minutes to electrify the crowd at Dominican University of California.
Carr and Finley Keeffe hit back-to-back threes to give second-seeded Branson (27-5) a 20-14 lead after a quarter, and Carr continued his dominance as the Bulls got off to a 12-2 start in the second frame, scoring on an up-and-under and an elbow jumper before hitting his fourth and fifth 3-pointers to give his team a 32-16 advantage.
“I’ve been watching him do that since fifth grade,” head coach Stevie Johnson said. “He has that in him all the time.”
With do-it-all sophomore Jase Butler nursing an ankle injury that he suffered in the third quarter of Tuesday’s win over Granite Bay, Carr’s role was magnified.
“He had no choice but to be aggressive with Jase Butler out tonight,” Johnson said. “Sometimes when you’re a freshman, you’re not as aggressive as you should be.”
The seventh-seeded Lancers did slow Carr in the second half, outscoring the hosts 16-7 in the third quarter and trailing by just four early in the fourth, but Carr blew by his defender for a layup and hit the last of his six threes to give his team a 46-37 lead with 5:20 left.
“I knew I still had to drive, be aggressive, set my teammates up and trust them to hit open shots,” Carr explained when asked about his adjustments when the Lancers keyed in on him in the second half.
The Bulls finished the game off with some of their signature suffocating defense, allowing just six points in the final 6:40.
“We can play at whatever pace we need to play,” said Johnson, whose team transitioned from an up-tempo first half to a slower finish. “We’re a fast team. The league we play in, not a lot of teams really press.”
St. Francis (16-13) went into halftime down 34-20 after a DJ Jones putback and faced a 39-27 deficit after a Joaquim Arauz-Moore 3-pointer, but TJ Motil hit a 3-pointer and fellow junior Gavin Everett scored all six of his points in the final 2:30 of the third to send the Lancers into the fourth down just 41-36. They trailed by four with 6:41 left when Tim Netane made one of two free throws but struggled at the line throughout the night, making just four of 12 foul shots.
Arauz-Moore scored 13 for the Bulls, including his team’s first six. He also finished with four rebounds and four assists. Montana commit Isaiah Kerr led the Lancers with 23 points in his final high school game.
Thursday’s loss marked the end of a three-year run for the Lancers with the core of Kerr, Vince Barringer and Harlan Banks. They exceeded expectations with a fifth-place WCAL finish and CCS Open Division Quarterfinal upset of Riordan as sophomores, won a CCS Division II title as juniors in an abbreviated season and finished fifth in the WCAL again in an injury-filled senior campaign.
“This was the seventh game they had started together this year,” head coach Mike Motil said. “Gavin didn’t start a game until the middle of January, and as soon as he started a game, Harlan went out, and that was just our season in a microcosm.”
Banks, who spent his freshman year at Sacred Heart Prep, saw his competitive basketball career come to an end on Thursday as he plans to attend film school at NYU. Barringer, a 3-point specialist who hit one on the game’s opening possession, is pursuing opportunities to play at the Division I level, whether as a scholarship player or as a preferred walk-on.
“It’s been a grueling two years. It feels like it’s been a two-year season, not the usual four- or five-month season,” Motil said. “We’ve been trying to open our gym since June of 2020. We’ve been going at it constantly, just getting kids out of their homes and giving kids opportunities to do something on campus. Whether it’s six feet away, wearing a mask, whatever it was, we were trying to get these kids on campus and make sure they understood that our community is a place where they’re loved and cared for.”
