City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of CoBL's "Prepping for Preps," our series of articles previewing area high school teams for the 2015-16 season. For the complete list of schools previewed so far, click here)

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Downingtown West was on fire entering March of 2015, having ripped off a 24-6 mark en route to a Ches-Mont conference title and state tournament bid--their first of each since 2008.

Then Roman Catholic happened, and all the excitement the Whippets built up came to a quick, painful halt, as the eventual state champions ran away in the fourth quarter of a 68-52 win.

Luckily for West, the story doesn’t end there.

With four of the five talented starters from last year’s playoff run returning, the Whippets are out to prove that last year wasn’t just a fluke.

“We definitely have a chip on our shoulder,” said senior guard Ryan Betley. “I think people see Downingtown West as a school that can beat the good teams, but people think we can’t compete with the great teams, the Catholic League teams like Roman Catholic, Neumann, Wood. I think this year we’ve got to prove that we can get over the hump and beat those teams.”

“We know how good we are, but other teams don’t know how good we are yet,” fellow senior Josh Warren added.

Betley and Warren, two senior starters returning from last year’s team, each committed to Ivy league schools this offseason--Betley, a 6-4 sharpshooter, committed to play at Penn, and Warren, a 6-8 center who can play inside and out, committed to Cornell.

“The weight of the world is off their shoulders, which means the weight of the world is off of my shoulders,” head coach Jason Ritter said. “We’re excited that we can now focus on committing to our team, rather than a college. We’re all in this year. That was two big hurdles that are out of the way, and now it’s time to get going.”

The two star Whippet seniors aren’t the only players that Ritter has to be excited about on his roster, as senior wing Dom Guerrera and junior forward George Gordon also return from last year’s starting lineup. Guerrera adds an undeniable boost of effort and work ethic on the floor, while Gordon’s athleticism in his 6-7 frame creates serious problems for opposing to defenses to cover both him and Warren.

While it does tend to be Warren and Betley who get most of the attention--Ritter even referred to them as “Rosh and Jyan” by mistake numerous times during the same interview, after having likely said their names together hundreds of times over the last few years--Guerrera, a potential Division II recruit, earned high accolades from his coach entering his senior season.

“I feel Dom is the best defender in the Ches-Mont,” Ritter said. “He’s our unsung hero, he makes all the plays that don’t show up on the score sheet. He’s kind of our ‘glue guy.’ Ryan’s our shooter, Josh is our big man, and Dom does all the little things that make a team successful. Every coach would kill to have a player like him.”

As for Gordon, he enters his junior year with half a season’s worth of experience in a starting role. Several other talented juniors and sophomores, however, will be stepping into new roles that were left by 2015 seniors like Cole Calamaro, Doug Conrad and Jeff Halle, who each contributed talent and leadership to the deep playoff run.

Nonetheless, the work these underclassmen have put in inspires great confidence in coach Ritter.

“We have a lot of good pieces coming up--we might have lost a lot of valuable pieces, but we’ve gained even more,” Ritter said. “With George stepping into a bigger role, with Matt Carson, Pat Kennedy, we’ve got a lot of guys that can do a lot of special things. We’re going to be tough to beat when we’re clicking on all cylinders.”

Carson and Kennedy, two point guards each entering their junior year, are the two most likely candidates to fill the open point guard position that was vacated by Conrad. Although they saw a bit of floor time in a few blowouts last season, neither has experience in a starting role. Either way, both are expected to fill much larger ball-handling roles for West in 2015-16.

That said, it’s the one-two-three-four punch of Betley, Warren, Guerrera, and Gordon is what specifically has Ritter expecting great things from his team. They way he sees it, there aren’t many teams around that have four different players to match up evenly with his fierce foursome.

And he’s probably right.

The only question mark for the Whippets is at the point guard position, which will be filled by any of the several young, inexperienced candidates the Whippets have to offer.

“A lot of them are working really hard,” Warren said. “We lost seven seniors last year so we have a lot of role play spots to fill in. We’ve had a lot of young kids who are putting in work on their own time and are going to be stepping into those positions.”

With the loss to Roman Catholic and the bitter end to a fantastic season that it brought now in the rear-view mirror, the Whippets are poised to defend their Ches-Mont title and solidify Downingtown West as one to watch in the state tournament.

“If you’re ever going to lose, the runner up lost to the state champs, and so did we," said Ritter. "Our mentality is to go further. Whether that means one more game, or five more games, we want to go further, we want to keep improving, and that’s their mentality...I keep telling them ‘all we want to be is 1-0. The rest will take care of itself.’”