Jasper Grassa Leads Classical Boys past Woburn in OT

By Steve Krause / The Daily Item

LYNN -- It's been said so often you could repeat it in your sleep: Big players come up big at big moments.

Jasper Grassa may not be big in stature, but Tuesday night at Classical, he proved to be enormous where it counts the most: In the clutch.

With the Rams reeling from Woburn captain Randy Parker's buzzer-beating three-pointer that sent the team's MIAA Division 2 North first-round game into overtime -- they were trailing by five with 1:17 to go in the extra session -- Grassa nailed two three-pointers within 35 seconds. Then he threaded the needle for the assist on Ariel Ligonde's hoop with 17 seconds to go, and finished by hitting two foul shots with .02 seconds to go, willing the Rams to a 57-52 victory.

"Jasper is tough," said a stunned Woburn coach Tommy Sullivan. "You don't go to Bentley on a ride unless you're tough."

Classical meets the winner of tonight's Malden Catholic/North Andover game in the quarterfinals, on a date to be announced.

Grassa, who had a game-high 25 -- despite being plagued by team-wide shooting woes (the Rams were 20 of 72 from the floor) -- stole Parker's thunder as well. With Classical leading, 47-44, with 7.4 seconds left, Woburn inbounded the ball under its own basket. Parker wasn't even the first option ... Michael Simpson was. But somehow, the pass to Simpson in the corner got tipped over to Parker, who -- with Grassa running and jumping at him with outstretched arms -- launched the three. He propelled himself backward so forcefully that he fell on his backside and didn't even see the ball go in as the buzzer sounded.

Parker (20 points) duplicated that feat right away in overtime, launching one up from even farther behind the arc ... and hitting nothing but net. And when Simpson (22 points) sank one with just over two minutes to go in OT, Woburn -- the No. 9 seed -- had a five-point lead.

But Grassa simply took over. His first of two threes came after a series of missed shots -- none of which even hit the rim -- and it swished through as the shot clock expired. Classical stole the inbounds pass, and Grassa took a shot at the top of the key and let another one fly. Swish.

"I knew," he said, "that we'd have to shoot well from the outside. They had (6-7 Nick Lund) and he was blocking everything near the hoop. So I knew we weren't going to be able to go to the rim."

With the team shooting poorly all night, Grassa said the only option was to keep shooting. Still, he said, he wasn't feeling it until the end.

"I had to feel it after that first one," he said. "Otherwise, we were going to lose."

It was an odd game for a number of reasons. First, Classical -- which never goes man-to-man on defense -- chose to do so Tuesday, mainly because of Lund (who only had three points). But when it got to crunch time, Grassa switched to a triangle-and-two (shadowing Simpson and Parker).

"Maybe," he said, "if I'd done that the whole game, we wouldn't have been taken to OT. I don't know why I changed. That's what we were going to do all along. We'd practiced the triangle-and-two. But then I figured I didn't want to be kicking myself for not guarding someone."

The game was also strange because where Woburn had a distinct height advantage over the Rams, Classical pulled down 55 rebounds, led by Tony Wonde (13), Ligonde (10), Josh Cheever (12) and Josh Imadiyi (8).

"Maybe that's because we shot so poorly, but it also indicates they did too," Grassa said.

Points were hard to come by all game long. It was 10-9, Woburn after one; 26-20 Classical at the break, and 32-32 after three.

Grassa was the only Ram in double figures, though Ligonde finished with nine points.