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West Chester Team Camp Notebook: Sat., June 13

06/14/2015, 12:00am EDT
By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Went down to West Chester University for the second day of its two-day high school team camp. The four courts at the South Gym were sweltering in the June heat, but that didn’t stop plenty of quality area programs from bringing their teams down for some games.

Here’s a notebook from the afternoon action:

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Abington turns to youth off District title
It was a veteran Abington squad that took home the 2015 District 1 AAAA title, with three starters graduating from a group of eight seniors that led the way to an incredibly successful season.

This year, Galloping Ghost coach Charles Grasty will now turn to a group of mostly-unproven seniors plus some talented underclassman to carry the torch from Matt Penecale, Amir Hinton and company.

“We’re going to have to do a lot of work this summer,” Grasty said while watching his team compete under the direction of one of his assistant coaches on Saturday afternoon. “We don’t have a lot of pieces coming back, but there are guys that have been around in the program for a while, so they know our stuff and they know what we expect.”

Grasty does have some seniors with varsity experience, including forwards Jack Steinman and Brian Close, plus point guard B.J. James. And while those three are going to be counted on heavily from a leadership standpoint and all have the inside track towards starting roles--Close started last year, while Steinman and James came off the bench--it’s their younger teammates that really represent the future.

That begins with rising sophomore Robbie Heath (pictured above), a native of Melbourne, Australia, who started alongside Matt Penecale and Amir Hinton in the backcourt last year as a true freshman. The 5-foot-11 guard, who’s already grown a few inches since the end of his freshman year, had some big moments in big games for a 26-4 team that went 16-0 in Suburban One-National play and won the SOL’s inaugural conference tournament.

“We’re not really setting (the bar) too high because he’s still only a sophomore, but he knows that he’s a big piece of what we want to do,” Grasty said.

Two incoming freshmen could factor into the Ghosts’ equation this year as well, and certainly look like they’ll be big pieces over the next few years. Lucas Monroe, a 6-4 wing, and Eric Dixon, a 6-6 forward, are considered among the top rising freshmen in the area, and they’ll add some size to a roster that already includes 6-9 rising junior Joe O’Brien, who missed his sophomore season with a broken foot, plus the 6-6 Steinman.

Heath is lucky to have had two talented, experienced and vocal senior guards to learn from, and now he has to pass those same lessons along.

“Coming in as a freshman, I had Matt Penecale and Amir Hinton, so that was pretty cool,” Heath said. “We’ve got a lot of young kids coming in so I’m just trying to teach them the way of high school basketball, it’s way faster than eighth grade. Just getting used to the hard screens and talk on defense, just basic stuff.”

Heath found his way to the Philadelphia suburbs because his father--Robert “Tiger” Heath--played at Abington in the mid-80s before going to Miami-Dade junior college in Florida and then Division II St. Cloud State in Minnesota. The elder Heath left school after his junior year for semi-pro ball in Australia back in 1988, and settled there to raise his family.

The father and son moved back to the United States last year, though Heath’s mother and two sisters remain in Melbourne.

“I want to go to play college basketball and I don’t think me staying in Australia would help me do that,” he said, and named two fellow Aussies who’ve gone onto hoops stardom since moving up to the States. “Dante Exum and Ben Simmons did it, I just want to be someone like them.”

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Chester working with chip on its shoulder
Take a high school basketball program with decades upon decades of success, deep community pride and a track record of district titles and state championships.

Now imagine what happens when that program misses out on the state tournament for the first time in 23 years.

They’re not too happy down in Chester, to put it lightly.

“It was pretty much a bad taste left in their mouths,” Clippers coach Larry Yarbray said. “First time in a long time we didn’t make it to the state playoffs.”

The final loss, to Coatesville in the play-back round of the District 1 AAAA playoffs, left Chester watching the PIAA playoffs for the first time since 1992. Since then, the Clippers had won six state championships and lost in the finals three other times, as well as taken home 13 District 1 titles.

Now, the team that has by and large dominated the Philadelphia suburban hoops landscape over the last two decades is playing with a chip on its shoulder.

And it showed on Saturday on the courts at West Chester, starting with a dominant 46-22 win over an Episcopal squad that was, admittedly, missing two starting guards.

Chester’s frontcourt, including senior Marquis Collins and juniors Jordan Camper and Jamar Sudan, looks much physically stronger than it did last season. Collins, a 6-foot-7 lefty, was especially aggressive in wins over Episcopal and West Chester Rustin, and the work he’s put in this offseason looks to be paying off.

“I feel like I had to change a lot, and as a team we had to change a lot,” Collins said. “I told everybody to look into the mirror, and personally, myself I felt like i was settling too much and I hurt the team. So I got in the weight room, gained 10 pounds of muscle and basically changed my game to an attacker now.”

Even the backcourt is strong, with rising senior wings Deshawn Hinson and Dymon Colbert both bringing a lot of physicality to the court, as does rising junior guard Arod Carter. If nothing else, Chester should be able to physically dominate most opponents this season, and they’ve got quite a bit else.

The blip of last season can somewhat be explained by youth and inexperience, combined with the loss of starting point guard Khaleeq Campbell to an ACL tear in December. Campbell is expected to be back by the start of the regular season, but the hope at Chester is that he’s not the beginning of the revival but joining in the middle of it.

“Unfortunately things didn’t go our way but hopefully this is a wake-up call,” Yarbray said. “Our season starts now, everybody’s hungry. We’re sending a message early.”

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Quick Hits
--Conestoga guard Darryl Caldwell, who will be a three-year starter for the Pioneers and is one of the leaders for head coach Mike Troy, was back at the head of ‘Stoga’s sharpshooting offense after missing some league games on Tuesday. The 5-foot-8, 165-pound point guard has a list of Division III schools already on his recruitment, including Dickinson, Franklin & Marshall, Marywood, Colby and Arcadia as well as D-II West Chester. He has a lot of areas of focus for improvement in his game, citing working on his jumpshot, shooting off the dribble, his basketball IQ and his defensive abilities.

--Academy Park guard Jawan Collins is only at the beginning of his recruitment, but he’s going to be one of the more sought-after small-college guards in the region if he continues to play like he did this weekend. The 5-11 combo guard is muscular and athletic, with a big-time scorers’ game; he can create his own shot against high-level defenders and hit tough jumpers in traffic, and he’s great at grabbing rebounds and leading the fast break. He said West Chester and Arcadia are the only two schools recruiting him thus far; he certainly looks capable of playing at the D-II level.

--Very impressed with the play of Collins, who’s definitely improved his physique a lot over the last 6-8 months. A year ago, he was still a somewhat-awkward forward who was still finding his place on the court, but now he’s really turning into an attacking combo forward with range out to the 3-point arc. His motor is running at a higher level and he’s capable of bringing the ball up the court as well as playing some point-forward for the Clippers’ offense. Rider has already offered and both Robert Morris and James Madison have been in contact; expect quite a few more mid-major offers if he brings that energy to the July live periods.


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