Thursday, October 1, 2026
Though it came more than five weeks ago, Elmont’s one-point loss to Harborfields as part of the Nassau-Suffolk boys’ basketball challenge on Martin Luther King weekend is still a fresh wound in the minds’ of the Spartans.
“We’ve been extremely motivated since the loss to Harborfields,” said senior Travis Robinson-Morgan, who led an impressive balanced effort with 16 points, all but two in the second half, in No. 2 Elmont’s 77-54 victory over third-seeded Valley Stream North in a Nassau Class A semifinal at Hofstra on Wednesday night. “We felt like we were punched in the face,” he added. “We’ve been practicing extra hard since that game.”
Sophomore K.C. Ndefo scored 13 points, including a dynamic alley-oop dunk midway through the first quarter, seniors Yasir Lawrence, Darius Celestin and Jalen Burgess had 12 each and sophomore Victor Olawoye chipped in 10 points for Elmont (19-3), which advanced to face top-seeded South Side in the title game. Senior Jordan James led Valley Stream North (17-4) with 14 points, junior Noah Shy added 12, and senior Josh Dennis had 10.
“We’ve got enough talent to share the ball,” said Elmont head coach George Holub, whose team scored 101 in its first-round win over Roosevelt. “We like to run, and on a bigger court like this we can get into open space even more.
North, which eliminated two-time defending champion Valley Stream South as well as Garden City in dramatic fashion, fell behind Elmont 20-10 after the opening quarter and failed to get closer. “We didn’t play a good first half,” VSN head coach Dan Achatz said. “Against a team like that, you can’t expect to come back from such a large deficit. We came out strong in the third quarter, but it wasn’t enough.”
Burgess scored 11 of Elmont’s 15 second-quarter points as it built a 35-16 cushion at halftime. North showed a spark early in the second half and got its vocal crowd fired up by scoring 12 of the first 16 points of the third quarter to close within 11, with James and Shamari Griffith (six points) leading the charge.
It was 39-28 following a Dennis steal and Dunk, but Elmont used a 12-4 run of its own to take momentum back for good. Robinson-Morgan, who hit a couple of treys in the third, drained another early in the fourth and watched the last six minutes from the bench.
“I’ve seen South Side three times,” Holub said of Elmont’s opponent in the finals. “It’ll be interesting.”
