City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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For the many top-flight athletes that come through Harrisburg High School, playing two sports is pretty much the norm.

Each of the three former Cougars to make Super Bowl appearances – Hank Poteat (New England, Super Bowl XXXIX), Tim Brown (Tampa Bay, XXXVII) and Kevin Mitchell (San Francisco, XXIX) – also played basketball during their high school years.

“98 percent of the kids that go on to the NFL have played basketball at Harrisburg,” head coach Kirk Smallwood said. “It’s nothing new.”

Tuesday night at the second annual Parkland Holiday Classic at Parkland High School, Harrisburg’s two-sport roots shined on the hardwood, as the Cougars out-muscled and out-hustled their way to an 84-72 win over the Lower Merion Aces.

“(This win) just proves that we have a lot of team chemistry and that we have a lot more to work on,” said junior forward and defensive end Micah Parsons, one of the many two-sport Cougars. “This is just a glimpse of what we can accomplish. This is just a glimpse of how good we can potentially be.”

On December 9, the Cougars’ football team fell to Archbishop Wood in the class 5A title game by a final of 37-10. That team included four Harrisburg basketball players: Parsons, defensive back  Zion Patterson, wide receiver Shaquon Anderson-Butts and defensive end Damion Barber.

Although only one of them truly plays defensive back, the entire Harrisburg roster looked like a team of cornerbacks and safeties in the way they took down Lower Merion; the Cougars flew in and out of passing lanes to force 13 turnovers and rattle the Aces with an omnipresent full court press.

“What we like to do is apply a whole lot of pressure on the ball and have the guys read in the passing lanes,” Smallwood said. “We’ll jump a passing lane, our whole game is that defensive back, wide receiver type mentality, where if it just goes up, you get it. That’s something we’re going to do against everybody, because we have athletes, we have bodies that we can run in and out, so we have to play fast.”

According to the Cougars’ top scorer from Tuesday night’s win, 6-foot-4 senior Elijah Barrett, who had 18 points, defense is the entire offense for Harrisburg.

“In practice, we work for hours on defense,” he said. “That’s our whole offense, we probably score 60 percent of our points on defense, and that’s what we start off on. Every time we go into practice, we say we need to start off on defense, get defensive stops, and score on the other end. It helps us create.“

If their defensive prowess wasn’t football-esque enough, the Cougars dominated down low in terms of their physicality, putting up over 80 points while making just one three-point shot.

“Well, we actually had about four three-pointers,” Smallwood said, referring to his team’s many three-point plays inside. “Not from the line, but we get the bucket and the free throw, we like the old-fashioned three.”

It was that lone three, from freshman guard Na’reece Glenn, who finished with 12 points, that gave Harrisburg its biggest lead, 57-40 with 3:25 left in the third quarter.

From there, Lower Merion used some hot shooting from 6-foot-3 sophomore wing Jack Forrest – who led all scorers with 28 points – to keep things interesting, but couldn’t find their way within single digits.

Parsons, a 6-foot-3, 215-pound senior who recently transferred from Central Dauphin, was a big part of the Cougars’ inside scoring threat, tallying 16 points, seven of which came in the first quarter to keep the early Lower Merion lead at 15-10 through one.

According to Parsons, such offensive production from the low post came as a result of specific work in that area since returning from the gridiron.

“Since I got back he’s been getting me back in shape and getting me better on my post moves,” said Parsons, Penn State football commit. “Definitely a lot of my post stuff was working and I was definitely finishing through contact which we worked on yesterday, so all the things that we’ve worked on yesterday and in previous days just clicked tonight.”

Smallwood spoke very highly of Parsons’ abilities and definitely sees the potential for a big season from him, given his size and athleticism as a defensive end.

“We’re just scratching the surface (with Parsons),” Smallwood said. “He’s an Alabama type of athlete, we can use those skills and transfer them to a basketball floor.

Although their double-digit win over a Philadelphia-area powerhouse may have made it seem otherwise, Smallwood doesn’t think his team has fully-gelled since the football players jumped back into hoops.

But if that’s the case – and if they’re anything like their football team – his team certainly has a high ceiling.

“We haven’t gelled yet,” he said. “We have guys on the floor that don’t know our system, our plays, they don’t know how we think in certain situations. It’s a work in progress. We have some nice pieces. When it’s time to be good I think we can be pretty good.”