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Rosemont rides the Presley train into CSAC semifinals

02/20/2018, 2:45am EST
By Josh Verlin

Charles "Choo" Presley and Rosemont are in the CSAC semifinals for the third year in a row. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)

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Charles Presley isn’t sure how his nickname really came about.

For as long as he knows, he’s always been Choo.

“My Grandmom gave me that nickname since I was two years old,” the Rosemont College senior said. “Everybody asks me, I never really have a reason. She came up with that nickname one day I guess because I used to play with Choo-Choo trains all the time. They used to call me Choo-Choo, and now it’s just Choo.

“Honestly, there’s a lot of people that don’t know my real name -- everyone calls me Choo around here,” he added.

Presley’s grandmother couldn’t have known it when she bestowed what has become Presley’s more common moniker upon him in his early childhood, but she picked a good one. For the Northeast Philadelphia native and Boys’ Latin product has become the engine that drives the train at Rosemont, which is sitting once again on the precipice of a new program high-water mark.

It was very obvious what Presley meant to the Ravens on Monday night as they convincingly beat Marywood 97-58 to move into the semifinals of the Colonials States Athletic Conference (CSAC) postseason basketball tournament for the fourth consecutive year. The 5-foot-10 guard led the way with a 25-point effort, thanks to hitting five triples on eight attempts.

But that’s not typically where Presley makes his impact felt for sixth-year head coach Robert “Barney” Hughes and his program at the small Catholic school on the Main Line, located just down the road from another small Catholic school whose men’s basketball team has gained a little more attention the last few years.

“Honestly, in all my years of coaching, I’m not sure that I’ve met a more sincere, genuinely good person than Charles Presley,” Hughes said. “For what he’s done for me personally and the program, can’t be summed up in a stat sheet. I know he had great stats tonight, but what he does for us goes well beyond that.”

Hughes said that Presley serves as his team’s mediator, often taking care of interpersonal disputes between teammates or hard feelings about playing times before they even need to reach the coaching staff’s attention.

But the example that most stuck out recently for the Rosemont coach was last week, after the team’s Senior Day win over Keystone College, when one of the players’ parents provided his food truck for a barbeque feast.

“Choo is the guy in the middle of everything, he’s orchestrating the whole thing,” Hughes recalled. “He’s telling people when to eat, he’s telling the jokes, he’s making sure all the parents are being taken care of, that everybody has a cookie and a piece of cake. He is catering to every single person and making sure that they’re happy. And I think when you ask for a leader, you can’t really ask for much more than someone who is way more concerned with other people’s happiness than they are about themselves. And that is who he is.”

Presley is used to setting the example.

The oldest of five siblings, he lives with his mother and four younger sisters in the Mayfair section of Northeast Philadelphia, where they moved when he was eight years old after previously living near Broad and Olney in the Logan neighborhood. He’s the first in his family to go to college, and he’ll be the first to graduate, which he’ll do with a communications degree this spring.

Presley also has a younger brother, Chauncey, a seventh-grader and aspiring hooper himself.

“They all look up to me -- brother this, brother that, they all come to me for advice or when they need help with school or anything,” Presley said. “I just try to stay on my P’s and Q’s and be the best role model, big brother I can for them.

“I know they’re watching me no matter what I do, whether it’s basketball or just being a man myself, I know my little brother is following me, my sisters are following me. So I just try to do the best I can do for my family.”

For at least one more game, Presley’s family is the Ravens, due in large part to the efforts of former Rosemont assistant Brian Hardy, who convinced Hughes to take a flier on a guard who averaged fewer than 10 ppg as a senior at Boys’ Latin.

Presley has played in 102 games in his Rosemont career, as a reserve for his first two seasons before moving into the starting lineup for 17 of 26 games as a junior; through his first three seasons, his highest scoring average was 6.2 ppg as a sophomore.

He’s put up career-best numbers as a sophomore, averaging 8.9 ppg, plus two assists and two rebounds per game, though he’s scored 46 points in his last two games.

By beating Marywood, Rosemont is in the CSAC semifinals for now the third consecutive year and fourth time in five years. That alone is a testament to Hughes, who took over a program that was only in its fourth year of existence, dating back to the first year that Rosemont went co-ed (2009-10), though inaugural head coach Ryan Tozer certainly laid the groundwork in his three seasons.

At now 17-9 on the season, Rosemont has now set the program record for wins, out-doing last year’s total by one. But now the Ravens find themselves at the point that’s proven to be a roadblock, in the final four of the CSAC. In the past four years, they’re winless against the perennial top three in the league -- Gwynedd Mercy, Cabrini and Neumann, each of which has beaten Rosemont once at this point

Awaiting on Wednesday night in the semifinals is regular-season champion Cabrini, featuring CSAC Player of the Year and likely All-American Tyheim Monroe. The Cavaliers have already beaten the Ravens twice this year but they’ve been far from blowouts: 92-81 at Rosemont on Jan. 9 and 88-83 at Cabrini on Feb. 10.

The upset won’t be easy, but it would be monumental.

“Going through all the humps and bumps we’ve taken as a program, it hasn’t been a perfect season,” Presley said, “so I think winning this semifinal game and advancing to the championship would mean so much not only for Rosemont but the Rosemont community, the school, faculty, the staff, everybody.”


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