City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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For many high school coaches, the balancing act between team success and player development can often be a tricky one.

Spend too much time on the individual, and the team can suffer. Focus too much on the greater good, and a promising young player can be slower to come around.

Such has been the case for Plymouth-Whitemarsh head coach Jim Donofrio and his promising 7-foot sophomore Naheem McLeod.

“It’s literally risk/reward,” the longtime Colonials head coach said. “(We) just lost Saturday, you want to make sure that doesn’t become momentum in the wrong direction, [but] you still have to develop the kid, you have to show faith in him.”

In a road game against Cheltenham with Suburban One League’s American Division title on the line, Donofrio was able to get the best of both worlds.

With three minutes to go in the fourth quarter of a three-point game, Plymouth-Whitemarsh went to its sophomore big man in the post, and he delivered with a key right-hand hook shot. That was certainly the biggest bucket of the evening for McLeod, who finished with a game-high 19 points in a 57-51 win.

It’s the fourth consecutive American Division title for the Colonials (17-3, 12-0), the defending District 1 AAAA champions. Although it’s largely a different group than the one that made it to the state semifinals a year ago, Donofrio hasn’t changed his goals one bit.

“They’re happy, and that’s a young team,” he said of a group that starts two juniors and one sophomore and brings three more underclassmen off the bench. “If this was a veteran team...they’d have won the league and had some high-fives and said we’ve got bigger things to do.

“I’m happy for them, I love the enthusiasm, but that just means we’ve got more work to do.”

It certainly helps having a rapidly-developing 7-footer in the middle.

McLeod arrived at Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School last fall about as raw as they come, though Donofrio and his staff recognized the potential they had in the growing teen with the enormous hands and feet.

But by the end of a freshman year where he barely saw the court for the Colonials’ varsity squad, McLeod’s confidence was down. He spent the the offseason in the gym working to gain that confidence back, knowing that his second year of high school was his chance to start to prove himself on the court.

“I spent my summers playing with Charles Bronson who’s overseas, I was playing with Will Wise, Damian Williams, the (Williams) twins, and C.J. Aiken. I was working on just dunking the ball, jump shots, free throws, a couple other things and mid-ranges.”

Throughout the season, McLeod has gotten the majority of his scoring output on put-backs or dump-off layups, occasionally posting or facing up though showing he was still very much learning in those facts of the game. He was more assertive throughout the Cheltenham game, stepping out for a 13-foot jumper and playing active in the post, in addition to grabbing eight boards and blocking three shots.

His willingness to go after his own shot has only developed recently.

“I got the confidence three games ago because my teammates were telling me I could score, I could do this,” he said. “I did not have the confidence before. I would get the ball, pass it back out and I would never look at the basket and then one I started to look at the basket, it just became easy.”

“You call it knocking down walls...he’s knocked another wall down in the last week or two,” Donofrio said. “And my job is to show faith in that, and he believes in himself like crazy, and all you want is the guy on the floor to believe in himself at that moment, so you hope you’re right and show faith in him -- and he’s been terrific.”

McLeod followed up his hook shot with a layup off a feed from junior guard Ahmin Williams to put Plymouth-Whitemarsh up 49-44, but the Colonials still had to survive one last Panthers salvo.

Cheltenham (15-5, 9-3) junior guard Ahmad Bickley knocked down a 3-pointer to make it a two-point game with two minutes to go, and a baseline jumper with 25 seconds left to cut it to just one.

But Ahmad Williams hit two foul shots to push the lead back to three, and his twin brother added two more for the final margin and the SOL-American title.

Both Williams brothers had a dozen for P-W, as did senior guard Cheo Houston.

Cheltenham was led by junior guard Jack Clark's 16 points; Bickley had 15 while senior guard Trevonn Pitts was held to just seven as he dealt with foul issues most of the game.

It’s the second year in a row P-W spoiled Cheltenham’s senior day, with last year’s 58-56 win in the building also securing the title.

“[The] league championship means everything,” McLeod said. “We want to win league, districts and states so this is the first championship, we got two more left.”

First comes the end of the regular season, with a home game against Quakertown and a trip to Upper Moreland next Tuesday; at this point, those games matter only for district playoff seeding.

The Colonials were third in the latest District 1 6A power rankings, and have high hopes of playing in the district championship in Villanova on March 4 and maybe in Hershey a few weeks after that.

“If you do this right, you’re playing March 24, that’s a lifetime from now,” Donofrio said. “And if you do it wrong, you’re done in two weeks."