Author: delcohoops

By Terry Toohey

Harrigan announced his resignation as the Lions’ boys basketball coach Sunday. Harrigan is the second basketball coach at O’Hara and third boys basketball coach from a Catholic League school in Delaware County to step down this spring.

Longtime O’Hara girls coach Linus McGinty announced his retirement last week. McGinty won 824 games in a 36-year career at O’Hara and Archbishop Carroll. He achieved 557 of those wins in 24 years at O’Hara. In that span he guided the Lions to the Catholic League final 16 times and won 11 championships.

Last month, Jack Concannon announced he was leaving Monsignor Bonner & Archbishop Prendergast after four seasons as the boys basketball coach. It was Concannon’s second stint at his alma mater. He was the head coach from 1992-96.

A day later, Paul Romanczuk stepped down after 15 seasons as the boys coach at Archbishop Carroll.

Harrigan went 16-29 overall and 5-21 in league play in two seasons at O’Hara. The Lions went 11-12 overall and 5-8 in the league in 2017-18.

Prior to O’Hara, Harrigan coached at now closed Del Val Charter for five seasons. He led the Warriors to the Public League and PIAA District 12 Class 3A titles in 2016.

 

By Matthew DeGeorge

As an athletic director, B.J. Hogan is used to the comings and goings of coaches. Not many of them, however, were once his 11th-grade math teacher. And none that he’s likely to encounter again will have the reputation and pedigree of Linus McGinty.

“It’s amazing,” Hogan said Tuesday. “You sit there and you look, I don’t know how many coaches nowadays could last at a school 25 years and be that successful. … It’s insane how successful he’s been.”

McGinty announced his retirement as the head girls basketball coach at Cardinal O’Hara Tuesday after 24 years at the school and over 800 career wins between O’Hara and Archbishop Carroll over the last four decades.

In the two dozen years at O’Hara, McGinty went 557-113, per the school, making the Catholic League final on 16 occasions and winning 11 titles, including the last two. He won 267 games in 12 seasons with Carroll, giving him 824 career wins.

At O’Hara, he mentored 14 Daily Times Players of the Year, three McDonald’s All-Americans and more than 60 players who went on to play basketball in college, more than 40 at the Division I level.

(click on this link for the full story)

By Rick O’Brien

The Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League recently sent an online survey to its member schools to find out their opinion regarding the current PIAA playoff format.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette listed the six questions in the survey. The No. 1 – and most pressing – question: Do you believe schools without geographical boundaries have a competitive advantage over schools with established geographical boundaries?

According to the Post-Gazette, 86 percent of the 108 schools (there are 138 WPIAL schools) that responded to the survey “said they would favor separate tournaments for boundary and non-boundary schools.”

By Matthew DeGeorge

The core of Delco’s hoops prowess this season resided in Class 5A, and media voters across the state reflected that in the release of the All-State basketball teams Tuesday.

Bonner & Prendergast’s Isaiah Wong was voted to the first team in Class 5A, one of seven Delco honorees, all in Class 5A.

Four of the seven second-team nods were doled out to Delco players: Bonner’s Ajiri Johnson, AJ Hoggard of Archbishop Carroll, Christian Ray of Haverford School and Penncrest’s Tyler Norwood. Antwuan Butler of Cardinal O’Hara and Tariq Ingraham of Bonner were third-teamers.

Players were chosen by media across the state according to PIAA classification/enrollment size, with three teams of honorees in each of the PIAA’s six classes. A player of the year and coach of the year were also recognized in each class.

Wong, the 2017-18 Daily Times Boys Basketball Player of the Year, averaged 22.2 points per game in his first season with the Friars after transferring from Notre Dame (N.J.). The 6-3 junior guard led Bonner & Prendie to its first PIAA tournament, advancing to the Class 5A semifinals before being knocked off by champion Abington Heights in overtime. (The Comets were represented by first-teamers Jackson Danzig and George Tinsley as well as coach of the year Ken Bianchi.)

(click on this link for the full article)

By Matthew DeGeorge

It’s not easy to get Isaiah Wong to crack a smile on the basketball court. Even dressed in his school uniform, tasked with the very un-competitive pursuit of taking portrait photos, a certain steeliness dawns once he steps on the court at Bonner & Prendergast. He’s not going to cross anyone over in his dress shoes, but the basketball in his hands still inspires the impassiveness of his visage.

There’s a couple of tricks to get Wong to offer a glimpse at his pearly whites, though. Bring up the number of close games his Friars played this year — 16 decided by 10 points or fewer, five that went to overtime and an 8-1 mark in the Philadelphia Catholic League in games decided by seven points or fewer — and you’ll see a hint of a grin curl up the corners of his mouth. Mention the prospect of rising to the individual challenge of playing in the Catholic League, and the smile grows wider still.

If you want to get Wong beaming, though, just bring up the chants — those heckles about him being from New Jersey and the student-section antagonism of “Ov-er-ra-ted” that he heard in cramped gyms across the Philly this year. That’s a sure-fire method to piquing Wong’s amusement.

(click on this link for the full story as well as links to the All-Delco team)

By Christopher A. Vito

In flashes, you can see Rondae Hollis-Jefferson on an NBA court and envision him wearing an orange-and-black uniform. The tools he developed at Chester High are the ones he showcases nightly on basketball’s grandest stage.

The smoothness that enables him to push the ball up the court in effortless strides. The creativity required to make acrobatic shots look routine. The aggressiveness to clean the glass against rebounders four inches taller.

Those attributes are constant, win or lose. And for Hollis-Jefferson, now 23, his team’s losses have far outnumbered its victories.

“I’m human. It wears on you. It definitely has its days,” he said.

Hollis-Jefferson’s most-pressing task, the one linked intrinsically with his pro career, is the ongoing rebuild of the downtrodden Brooklyn Nets. The third-year pro is compiling his best season as the club’s longest-tenured player, one whose leadership extends beyond his place atop many of its stat categories.

Beyond basketball, he focuses on change — changing lives, changing outlooks, changing what the future holds for children in Chester. The irony, he freely admits, is that a guy so dedicated to change remains the same.

(click on this link for the full story)

By Delcohoops.com Staff

It has been a terrific 5 years since we started this web site and each year we see more visitors to both our web site and our broadcasts. To have surpassed 750,000 hits in just five years is truly remarkable for us when you consider the basketball season starts in December but doesn’t get serious until January and then is over in mid-March.  It’s even more remarkable when you consider that we lose a sizeable amount of our athletes and players to graduation every year.  It tells us that we are becoming a valuable and appreciated source for high school basketball in Delaware County.  That’s exactly what we hoped for when we started this endeavor.

A big thank-you to the sponsors on the right side of these pages.  We wanted to provide a web site and broadcast availability that would be free to anyone who had Internet access and our generous sponsors have been the reason we are able to provide that service.  Please make an effort to visit these sponsors and mention us.  They support us because they believe in what we do but it always helps if they can pick up a little business as well.

A big thank you to Dave Burman, “Mr. High School Sports”, who makes every game exciting and whose voice has become synonymous with high school basketball in Delco.  He is a pleasure to work with and nobody knows high school sports like Dave!

And kudos to Pete ‘Stat Man’ Fulginiti who made every game and kept track of important game numbers as well as his valuable insight into the game of basketball.  He is a valued member of our broadcast team and adds a great dimension to our broadcast.

Thanks again to Coach Mark Jordan, who we bring in towards the end of each year to help with playoff games. As an actual high school basketball coach, Mark adds a dimension and “vision” of the game that is unparalleled.

Thanks to all the school Athletic Directors who are our “go-to” people for setting up broadcasts and getting us floor positions for the games.  These men and women are responsible for all the athletic contests, transportation, uniforms, scheduling, etc. that make high school games appear flawless.  We know we’re just another thing that they have do and we appreciate their efforts on our behalf.

And lastly to our athletic participants, families and fans who we like to hear from and know that they appreciate our product.  We love producing our web pages and broadcasts and watching these young men and women develop as athletes and adults is truly a pleasure.  See you all in December 2018!

 

 

By Keith Groller

The numbers are scrutinized like winning lottery numbers.

As soon as the finalists for the PIAA’s basketball championship games are determined, many fans crunch the numbers to determine how many of the teams headed to the Giant Center are public schools, charter schools or private schools.

The breakdown of the 24 teams going for the gold this week is: 11 public, 11 private, two charter.

But PIAA Executive Director Robert Lombardi doesn’t need new data to know the numbers are disproportionate. He hears about it every day, and the volume is turned up a notch or two every December and March, when the state football and basketball champs are decided.

The dominance of private/charter schools, particularly from Philadelphia, and the controversy over transfers continue to be the PIAA’s hot-button issues.

(click on this link for the full story)

  

 

By Aaron Carr & Daniel Gallen

(click on this link for all the match-ups and your chance to pick the winners of each game)

 

  

By Chris Masse

So the PIAA is mad at me. In the ultimate irony, it also accuses me of doing PIAA athletes and schools a disservice.

Seriously. It actually said that. An association that every year does public school athletes and schools a disservice by having hypocritical and inconsistent rules said I provide the disservice.

I received an email from PIAA Executive Director Dr. Robert Lombardi Wednesday afternoon following publication of Monday’s Sun-Gazette column in which I pushed for the PIAA to change its unfair practices.

“We understand your opinion, but to offer a misinterpretation of PIAA by-laws that has an impact upon our schools, their students and their communities is damaging to our association and the general public and we are requesting a correction.

“The issue at hand is your interpretation of the 75 percent rules as a by-law that impacts transfer students and that is factually incorrect. You indicate that academics are the only reason that is permitted for a transfer to be approved under our rules. This statement is also incorrect. There are many reasons that are acceptable for a student to transfer other than academics and many are listed in our by-laws.

“The 75 percent rule is a rule that was put into place to address students that participate on an out of school team that same time they are a member of their school team and forgo school competition until postseason so they can garner accolades. This rule has nothing to do with a student that transferred from another state back to Philadelphia where they started as a student.”

Ok, a few things.

(click on this link for the full story)

(click on this link for the original story from Chris Masse)