City of Basketball Love

Tyler Sandora (@tyler_sandora)
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The strategy that Dana “Binky” Johnson has had to plot out in Norristown High School’s gymnasium has changed somewhat over the years.

It started with his childhood friend Julius Mack, now a Norristown assistant coach.

“When the buzzer goes off, [it was] how do we get a shot off before the police kick us off the court?” Johnson remembered. “We would take different angles, and cause distractions.”

That was when they were five years old.

By the time he was in high school wearing a Norristown Eagle uniform, the all-state guard was winning district titles and drawing plenty of attention from college programs.

And now, 38 years after graduating from Norristown High School, Johnson is back on the Norristown sideline as the head coach.

Now, his strategy revolves around trying to get the Eagles back to their glory days, centered around the youth program Johnson has built from the ground up.

“We want to get the community back again,” he said. “We are a community-based program. It’s not just the high school.”

Just like it was when Johnson was playing.

Upon graduation from Norristown in 1990, Johnson decided to play basketball at Canisius University. Though “major” Division I programs were recruiting him, he said, a broken ankle in his junior year scared some coaches away.

Marty Marbach, an assistant coach at Villanova University during Johnson’s junior year, was hired as the head coach at Canisius the following year, and continued to recruit the 6-1 guard.  

Over his first three years at Canisius, Johnson only averaged 4.2 points per game. During his senior year, he scored 12.2 points per contest, earning him MAAC first-team honors.

How much does Johnson love the city of Norristown? When he was at Canisius, Johnson said, he hung up a poster in his dorm room that read, “London, Paris, Rome, Norristown.”

“I was comparing [Norristown] to some of the greatest places in the world,” Johnson said. “I had that in college. I had guys from New York City always talking about N-Town. And I always repped it everywhere I went. On the local, national, and international level, Norristown is known.”

After Canisius, Johnson played professionally in England for two seasons, until another broken ankle ended his playing career.

Johnson then came back to Norristown in 1996. When there wasn’t any coaching jobs available at the high school level, Johnson began developing the Norristown youth program.

He spent the next decade bouncing in and out of assistant coaching jobs at Norristown, all while keeping his job as dean of the Montgomery County Vo-Tech center. Johnson’s last stint as an assistant at Norristown came in 2008, when future Temple standout Khalif Wyatt led the Eagles all the way to the state championship game.

This is clearly a different era for Norristown basketball.

The Eagles finished 17-15 last season in their first year in the Pioneer Athletic Conference, losing to eventual champion Abington in the second round of the PIAA District 1 6A tournament.

After coach Mike Evans’ departure as head coach late this summer, a void needed to be filled. It was only right that Johnson take the job. But at first, he wasn’t interested.

“My age, and just the head coaching job...I thought the ship had sailed,” he said.

Despite these thoughts, some phone calls and texts from some “very important” people that Johnson admires, he decided it was only right to take the job.

On September 25, Binky Johnson became the Norristown boys basketball coach.

“It’s exciting,” he said. “It’s one of those things where people will talk about dreams, and hitting lotteries, this is that situation for me. Coaching Norristown is something I dreamt about as a kid.”

Back when Johnson was playing, Norristown had solidified itself as one of the unofficial powerhouses in District 1 basketball. The Eagles’ boys basketball program holds one state championship, eight district championships, and 30 league titles in his history.

Now as head coach, Johnson hopes to one day get back to that level of competition. But, he realizes that kind of success doesn’t come overnight.

“Without question every year we are going to raise the bar,” Johnson said. “We have the foundation, as you see we want to win district, league, and compete for a state powerhouse, consistently. We want to set the bar high so we give the kids something to build off of. That first year we are going to set a solid foundation and continue to grow day by day, week by week, month by month. We will see where the chips lay the first year, then we will be in good shape.”

The development of Johnson’s youth organization is starting to pay off, as most of the players coming through the Eagles’ program have been playing together for years as kids.

This years’ team features some players who, although haven’t been playing on the varsity level together, have grown up on the playgrounds and in the gym’s playing for Johnson’s leagues.

“This year, it’s a whole new ball game,” junior Mickeel Allen said. “Things are a lot more disciplined and structured, we come to play. [Practice] is more intense, more tenacious, everybody is going for each other, everybody wants to get time on that court.”

For Johnson, getting Norristown basketball back to the way it used to be, would mean everything.

“Some people want to win the lottery, be rich,” he said, “but I get to coach Norristown basketball.”

Who could have planned that?