The 2014-15 season was in many ways a breakthrough year for Suffolk Christian Academy’s boys’ basketball team, so it was only fitting that it experienced two more breakthroughs when the all-conference votes came in.

Senior guard/forward Nathan Leiter made the All-Hampton Roads Athletic Conference first team.

“We were pretty excited,” said Terry Leiter, SCA coach and Nathan’s father. “This is the first year he’s made the first team.”

Junior forward/guard Steven Effler made the All-HRAC second team.

“This was the first time he’s made the second team,” Coach Leiter said.

The coaches of the different teams in the conference were the ones casting the votes to determine which players would be honored.

This year, the Knights improved dramatically on their four-win 2013-14 season, going 11-16 overall. However, the HRAC has several strong teams with better records that were bound to have representatives on the six-member all-conference first team.

But Coach Leiter said that one thing helping Nathan Leiter with voters was that “some of the teams got to see us play in really tough games when we were missing people.”

He noted that the coach of Virginia Beach Friends School mentioned how he was impressed with Nathan Leiter’s performance during the Peninsula Catholic Holiday Classic. Suffolk Christian went 0-3 in the tournament and was missing Effler throughout due to injury, among other players.

“He never gave up and continued to battle hard,” Leiter said

Naturally, conference opponents and their coaches also got to see SCA twice during the regular season, so they knew what Nathan Leiter was about.

He averaged 17.3 points, 8.1 rebounds and a league-leading 4.5 assists.

Making the all-conference first team was the fulfillment of one of Leiter’s goals for this year. He made the second team last year.

“As a point guard, it wasn’t his job to score as much as it was Steven’s job,” Coach Leiter said.

Effler averaged 18.2 points, 7.6 rebounds and 2.0 steals per game to clinch his inaugural all-conference honor.

“Steven was definitely a scoring machine this year,” Coach Leiter said. “I really thought he deserved it this year.”

Effler was one of the higher scoring players in the entire league, “and he also was a pretty solid rebounder this year,” the coach said.

In addition to those reasons, his tenacity to create scoring opportunities even when there was not a clear lane to the rim “probably had a lot to do with why he was selected,” Coach Leiter said.