Chichester’s Akhir Keys pushes the ball upcourt in a January game against Academy Park. Keys scored 16 points to get the Eagles to states with a 37-36 win over Sun Valley Saturday. (PETE BANNAN – DAILY TIMES)
By Jack McCaffery
As the head coach at Penn Wood High for 11 years, Clyde Jones usually could figure out most Del Val League basketball mysteries.
One, though, kept him puzzled: How could rival Chichester, so often blessed with good players and tucked in ever-basketball-fertile Delaware County, never have qualified for a single PIAA state tournament?
To find out, he accepted the Eagles’ coaching job five years ago, fought through a rebuilding process, and by Saturday, helped put an end to that question.
With a swarming defense, a late three-point shot from Zaiyin Keys and 16 points from Akhir Keys, Chichester would nip host Sun Valley, 37-36, in a PIAA District 1 Class 5A playback to secure its first state tournament berth.
Behind Jones, who coached Penn Wood to the 2009 PIAA Class AAAA state championship and later took Girard College into the tournament before accepting the Chichester job in 2018, it didn’t take long.
“It’s the reason I wanted to come to Chi,” he said. “They had talent and I just thought it was a budding basketball community. To get an opportunity to start or rebuild a program was just something I was looking for. And being in the Del Val for so long, I knew the area, so I said, ‘I’ll give this a shot.’”