It was a short bench, but a long season for Tyler and Rick Patch and the Seekonk High basketball Warriors.

The father-son duo helped create 18 victories overall, a second-place finish in the South Coast Conference and a trip to the second round of the MIAA Division 3-South Sectional Tournament this season.

The Patch family, along with a trio of members from the MIAA Tournament-qualifying Attleboro and Mansfield High School teams, highlight the selections to the 2007-08 Sun Chronicle Boys' All-Star Basketball Team.

Patch, the all-time leading boys' scorer at Seekonk High with 1,746 points and a four-time All-Sun Chronicle selection is joined on the 14-member congregation of the area's most elite basketball players by his dad Rick, the former North Attleboro High Rocketeer, who earned Coach of the Year honors.

Attleboro High's trio of seniors - Allen Whigham-Leach, Jared Linhares Mac Borgellas - were selected to the all-star team along with a trio of Hornets who guided Mansfield High into the MIAA Tournament for the first time in a decade - James McGrath, Andrew Venter and Jameson Dingle. Bishop Feehan High's Ryan Lee, Dighton-Rehoboth High's Nate Koneski and North Attleboro High's Mike Hart were joined on the team by Norton High's inside-outside duo of Darren Doucette and Chris Brooks along with two very special players who ran the floor so well for the Foxboro High Warriors, Ali Mourtada and Francisco Alicea.

Mansfield won five straight games at the end of the season and totaled the second-most wins (13) of any area team behind Seekonk. The Lancers reversed their regular season record from 7-13 a year ago to 13-7. Meanwhile, Attleboro and Foxboro both notched 11 wins, while the Shamrocks were the sixth area team to advance to postseason play by winning eight games.

The younger Patch was named the South Coast Conference MVP and during his four years on the floor for his dad and the Warriors, Seekonk produced a 75-18 record.

It was quite a coaching feat for the elder Patch, who never had his preseason team together at any time for the regular season owing to injuries and illness. "The difficult thing was to mix and match guys because we had such a small group of players to begin with," said Patch.

"It was difficult getting guys acclimated. It was difficult in the sense that they never had continuity together for any length of time."

Back, wrist and hip injuries claimed four of the top seven players back at one time or another and Patch was using two freshmen regularly over the final two weeks of the season.

"Tyler alleviated some of the growing pains, we put a lot on his shoulders," said the elder Patch of the senior swingman taking some of the ball-handling duties, attacking the glass for rebounds, while scoring 20 points or more in all but two of the Warriors' 22 games.

"We just tried to get the kids to believe in themselves," added the elder Patch, "to play fundamentally sound basketball. We were going to try to put them in position to win games."

Seekonk was 15-1 at one juncture, having won its first seven games of the season, losing a nine-point game to eventual SCC champion Wareham, and then reeling off eight straight successes.

Only four of the Warriors' wins were by margins of 10 points or less - including a dramatic two-point victory in overtime at arch-rival Dighton-Rehoboth. "Regardless of who went down, we expected the next guy to step up," added Patch of his roster shuffling, promoting junior varsity members and disguising defenses. "The kids believed in that, it showed when they came into play."

The Warriors were the No. 5 seed for the Div. 3-South Sectional, beat South Shore League runner-up Carver before losing to eventual champion Scituate (which beat Wareham by four in the finale) in the second round.

"What will help is that next year will be the first year that we've had five or six seniors in the program for four years," said the elder Patch, graduating just two seniors. "We had two freshmen (Sean Heaney, Andrew Killian) get a ton of experience. a sophomore (Ricky Silva) get a lot of minutes.

"A majority of our practices are based on fundamentals and we spend about 15-20 minutes on stuff we will use next year - that helps us in transition. Our expectations are high, the league and Division 3-South will be strong. We think that the experience we gained this year will pay off."