City of Basketball Love

Max Buchdahl (@max_buchdahl)
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It was nearly a year ago that Chester High School point guard Khaleeq Campbell suffered a season-ending knee injury. The Clippers never recovered from the loss of their star guard, and missed the PIAA playoffs for the first time since 1992.

Campbell’s Clippers returned to the site of that horrific injury, the Schwartz Athletic Center at Widener University, on Saturday as the team defeated Martin Luther King High School, 60-56, in the Scholastic Play-By-Play Tip Off Classic.

Chester completed an extremely impressive second-half comeback, as King dominated the early minutes of the game, taking a 24-6 lead into the second quarter.

“I just told my team to believe and trust in themselves,” Chester coach Larry Yarbray said. “We slowly grinded away, playing the game in sequences and taking it possession by possession.”

King led by as many as 20 points before the Clippers began to cut into the lead, making it a 14-point game at halftime. By the end of the third quarter, the King lead was just four points.

Senior forward Marquis Collins led the way for the Clippers in the third quarter, scoring seven of his 11 total points in those eight minutes. He also finished the game with a team-high six rebounds.

After three ties in the span of about four minutes, Chester took its first lead of the game at the 1:08 mark in the fourth quarter. It was a Campbell three-pointer that broke a 53-53 tie and gave his team the lead.

The Clippers didn’t look back after that key bucket by Campbell, who would go onto hit four key free throws to seal the Chester victory.

“I don’t look at it as pressure,” Campbell said. “I just see it as what I have to do.”

In just his second game back following the injury, and given his return to the exact location that the injury took place, Campbell admitted that he was thinking about it as the game began.

As he played the first few minutes, however, he began to see it as just another game.

“I didn’t want to come out scared because of what happened last year,” Campbell, who had a game-high 19 points, said.

Yarbray recognized his point guard’s hesitance, and was worried that Campbell seemed rattled in the opening minutes of the game.

“His adrenaline got pumping in the second half, and he decided to leave it all on the court and play his brand of basketball,” Yarbray said. “We need his leadership.”

Chester opened their season on Friday night with a 59-57 home loss to Sanford. Playing less than 24 hours after that loss, the Clippers had to grind their way through another competitive game.

Meanwhile, King head coach Sean Colson seemed understanding of his team’s loss in the moments following the game.

“I knew [Chester] was going to come back. They’re a good team,” Colson said. “At the end of the game, they just made more plays than us.”

Colson, who admitted that he is usually “on fire” after losses similar to the one against Chester, attributed the loss to his team’s general youth and inexperience.

After all, this is a King squad that has to replace four senior starters from a team that went to the PIAA Class AAAA finals last year.

“I was happy to see a lot of our guys step it up and play hard,” Colson said.

King’s leading scorer was senior forward Rasool Samir, who scored 10 of his team’s first 16 points and finished with a team-high 17 for the game.

The team also got an impressive 11-point performance from Kahssian Kay, who just transferred from Southern High School.

Ultimately, though, Campbell and company took charge in the fourth quarter, and evened the Clippers’ record to 1-1 on the year.

It was a double-comeback of sorts for Campbell and his Clippers: a win following what was once a 20-point deficit, and an emphatic return to the basketball court for the team’s leader.