City of Basketball Love

Zach Drapkin (@ZachDrapkin)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2016-17 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 11. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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Division II college basketball programs don’t usually make headlines when they come up against D-I teams in exhibition games.

But when Lock Haven’s Amir Hinton dropped 32 on Penn State on Friday, he certainly turned heads, though that wasn’t his original goal.

“I think it will bring some attention to me just because it was a Big Ten team,” Hinton said. “I didn’t worry about points or anything, I was just playing. The goal was just to play better than I played the first game and correct the mistakes that I had in (a scrimmage against Holy Family).”

The Bald Eagles still lost by a 91-65 margin, but Hinton’s standout performance affirmed head coach Mike Nestor’s decision to redshirt the 6-5 guard.

Hinton sat out last season, working on his game after a strong high school career at Abington. He certainly feels the year on the sidelines helped.

“I wanted to show everybody or show people that were watching that I’ve been working on my game and I’ve been improving over the year that I sat out. It was kind of a chip on my shoulder,” Hinton said. “Redshirting actually taught me a lot about the game itself, different things I actually didn’t know coming into college.”

Nestor agrees.

“Amir Hinton is a player we think can be really special. He’s got a lot of talent and if he puts the work in he can make a big impact coming off a redshirt year,” the 2014 PSAC East Coach of the Year told CoBL back in September. “He can be at that level of league newcomers, especially being able to sit out and year and practice with us and see how we operate.”

After graduating multiple key seniors, including Tracy Peal (20 mpg, 7.5 ppg) and Al Blount (22 mpg, 7.2 ppg), the Bald Eagles will be counting on underclassmen like Hinton to step up. Hinton is certainly ready for the task, but he would rather focus on the development process taking place for him and for Lock Haven.

“I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself and think I have to have a perfect game every game. I just want to enjoy myself and get my teammates involved,” Hinton said. “I still have some things to work on.”

The burden certainly won’t only be on Hinton. Lock Haven returns two of its top three scorers from last season – 6-3 redshirt senior Braheime Jackson (11.1 ppg) and 6-7 redshirt junior Ra’eese Hunt (7.8 ppg) – as well as their other two projected starters in 6-3 senior Cole Renninger and 6-1 redshirt freshman Jihad Barnes. 5-7 Chester point guard Khaleeq Campbell was added to the rotation as well, one of five true freshmen on the roster.

With the amount of youth there’s definitely lots of growth to be had for the Bald Eagles. It will indubitably be a multi-year process, and so far, Hinton thinks it’s going well.

“We’re actually doing well with that process,” Hinton said. “At first it was a little slow and everyone was trying to learn, but around midtime of the year, everyone picked up on everything all of a sudden.”

Despite it being a time of maturation and progress, Nestor’s team wants to win. It’s made three consecutive playoff appearances, something that hadn’t been done at the school in thirty-plus years, and the Bald Eagles don’t want to stop there.

Lock Haven finished 8-14 in conference play last season – and 12-15 overall – in a tough PSAC East conference which features the likes of West Chester, East Stroudsburg, Kutztown, and Shippensburg, among others.

One of those opponents in particular pits Hinton against a close high school teammate, West Chester’s Matt Penecale. Hinton and Penecale formed a powerful Abington backcourt that led the Ghosts to a 26-2 record in ‘14-15 and delivered the inaugural Suburban One League championship and a District 1 AAAA championship.

Hinton cheered on Penecale as he went on to average an impressive 10.3 ppg in his freshman season with the Golden Rams. But now, as the two play essential roles on opposing teams in the same league, competition and rivalry enter the picture.

“He congratulated me for my big game. He said he hopes I’m not playing that well when we play them, so we laughed about that.” Hinton said. “As far as playing each other, we’re both excited to go up against each other. At the end of the day, he’s still like a brother to me because he was my teammate.”

It’s clear that not everything basketball-wise has stayed the same since high school. Hinton says what changed the most for him over his redshirt year has been his mentality toward the game.

“In high school, I had a different mindset towards the game. Now that I’ve really learned different things about the game, I approach the game differently,” he said. “Staying composed in high school wasn’t something that I really focused on as far as when the ref called a bad call. I feel like my coach has worked with me very well with that, keeping my composure.”

That composure will be key to leading Lock Haven to another successful run in PSAC play in ‘16-17. Another crucial aspect will be Hinton’s much-improved shot, which showed against PSU as he shot 10-of-20 from the field, 3-7 from beyond the arc, and 9-10 from the line in 37 minutes on the court.

“Redshirting actually taught me a lot about the game itself, different things I actually didn’t know coming into college, just different aspects of my game that my coach focused on like shooting faster,” Hinton said. “I got up a lot of shots to improve my shot. So it helped me. A lot.”

Now it’s Hinton’s turn to help Nestor continue to propel this Lock Haven program to new heights in the coach’s sixth season with the school. Time will ultimately tell, but as of now, it looks as though redshirting is already paying its dividends.