Chester’s Larenzo Jerkins, right, is trying to defend against Imhotep’s Ahman Nowell in the PIAA Class 5A semifinal last March.(Pete Bannan – MediaNews Group)
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By Jack McCaffery
Because of the rumors, because of his instincts, because his program is so deep that it begins to develop players at the youngest ages and because he has come to know how high school basketball has been warped in the last decade, Keith Taylor had to know it was coming.
Anymore, the basketball coach at Chester High just reduces it all to a vaguely familiar slogan.
“What Chester makes,” he said, “other people take.”
Chester makes plenty. It is particularly adept at developing basketball players, and Taylor was lamenting the latest cost of that make-take dynamic, as high-major Clippers forward prospect Larenzo Jerkins has left after his sophomore season to attend Neumann-Goretti in South Philadelphia. A 6-5 battler with an anticipated growth spurt, Jerkins is a natural rim protector and timely scorer and would have been the key piece for the Clippers for the next two years. But even before his sophomore season, Jerkins was confirming that he was being wooed not by college recruiters but the high-school variety.
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