City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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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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In quite a few ways, this is a year of transition for George Washington’s boys basketball program.

That begins with its leadership: gone is head coach John Creighton, who took the athletic director position at Cheltenham High School. Hired in October was Kyle Sample, a West Chester alum who spent last season as an assistant with Constitution but who also has plenty of coaching experience on the AAU circuit as a program director with Team Philly.

And all he has to do is replace the vast majority of his minutes from a year ago while helping a young team adjust to its first year in the top level of the re-organized Public League.

As expected, it’s been a busy few weeks since he took over at the Northeast Philadelphia public school, located at 10175 Bustleton Ave.

“Oh man, nuts,” he said, a word he repeated several more times, before this: “Actually it’s been a lot better than I thought it would be…(the players) seem to have bought in a lot earlier than I thought they would.”

The first thing Sample did upon taking the job was familiarize himself with those in charge at the school. Washington’s had issues with violence in its halls recently, with fights breaking out daily that last month sent one student to the hospital.

Sample wants to be sure that not only are his student-athletes staying away from that behavior, but that they begin to take their work in the classroom as seriously as they do their time on the court.

“It would be really hard to have a successful year without having the help of our athletic director, principal, school teachers and security, especially with everything that’s been going on at George Washington,” he said. “I had kids that were going to be qualified to play, eligible to play, making sure kids had the classes they needed and making sure they knew their education was going to come first, before basketball.”

To help keep some continuity with the program, Sample’s retained three assistant coaches who were there previously--Darrel Rozenblad, Jermaine Williams and Charles Socki--while bringing in Imhotep assistant Aaron Baker as well as one of his Team Philly coaches, Demar Morine, who also spent time on the coaching staffs at IUP and Gwynedd-Mercy.

Once that was taken care of, Sample turned his attention to a roster that’s inexperienced not only in terms of varsity minutes but is also still getting used to playing together.

And none of them have faced the level of competition they’ll be up against consistently this year.

A full 10 seniors graduated from a team that went 19-7 overall and 12-0 in Public League ‘B’ play in 2014-15, earning the promotion up to the Pub’s top division, the “Super Six” group that also includes Constitution, Imhotep, Math Civics & Sciences, Delaware Valley Charter and Martin Luther King.

That team’s leading scorer, 6-6 wing Charlie Brown (16.1 ppg), is doing a post-grad year at St. Thomas More (Conn.) before he heads to Saint Joseph’s next fall. Three other starters are gone, leaving only junior wing Shaheed Fagan-Haynes (4.3 ppg) remaining.

“He’s going to play a huge role for us this year,” Sample said of Fagan-Haynes, a 6-4 wing who can play multiple positions out on the perimeter.

Also returning is 6-4 senior wing Quadere Allen, who averaged 4.8 ppg a year ago in his first year at the school after transferring in from Archbishop Carroll. Sample is relying heavily on Allen from a leadership standpoint as one of his few seniors.

“I think without him, things would have been a lot harder,” Sample said. “He helps out a lot, in the beginning early on, just establishing like we know what it takes to win, follow our lead and he’s been doing a good job of stepping up and being a leader.”

Four other transfers will also be contributing around the perimeter: Denelle Holly, a 6-2 sophomore guard (Neumann-Goretti), 6-2 junior Saleem Brown, 6-4 forward Alex Smith and point guard Verland Wayns Jr., a Sankofa Freedom Charter transfer and younger brother of former ‘Nova star Maalik Wayns.

Up front, the Eagles will rely on two more transfers: junior Elijah Kiah-El, a 6-7 forward from Mastery South, and sophomore Jahi Randle, a 6-5, 235-pound “bruiser,” according to Sample, who came from KIPP DuBois Charter. That pair should should help anchor a defense that their coach wants to center his team around.

“We definitely want to be physical, we want to be tough and we have a strong defensive presence and keep people out of the lane,” Sample said. “We’re hoping that our defense can translate to some easy plays in transition--we want to play fast, want to get the ball up the court, score easily in transition, not just in the fast break but in our secondary break as well.”

With all these new pieces, Sample knows he has a lot of work on his hands: he admitted it was likely a “2-to-3 year” plan to get to a Public League championship, which can be a tough thing to swallow for a coach who's as driven to win as any other around.

On the flip side, he knows that his work is cut out for him.

“Any success that we do have will strictly reflect on us,” he said. “It won’t be looked at as ‘those guys came in and they were dealt a great hand.’ No, we worked our butt off in the offseason to get these guys prepared.”