City of Basketball Love

Ari Glazier (@AriGlazier)
~~

Manir Waller swears he didn’t know that he would win Homecoming King. He may have had an inkling, though.

“I wasn’t really surprised, but...I didn’t think I was gonna win,” the Abington Senior High senior said. “Everybody supported me, everybody kept telling me I was gonna win, but (I was) trying not to let it get to my head, just stay humble.”

The victory was a testament to the admiration that the Abington community has for Waller –– who, aside from his royal duties, has taken up the leadership mantle on a basketball team moving on from one of the most successful stretches in school history.

With forward Eric Dixon and guard Lucas Monroe at the helm, the Ghosts won the last three District 1 6A championships. With Dixon now redshirting at Villanova, Monroe playing for Big 5 rival Penn, and eight other seniors having graduated, Waller, who played an auxiliary role in last year’s title team, is at the helm of a squad competing in a league and district that appears to be wide open. 

“I had a lot of guys to look up to and really pick their brains and lear a lot of stuff from,” the 6-foot-3 off-guard said. “We’ve got a lot of pressure on our shoulders now to do that again, but we’re just taking our time, not listening to everybody else that’s just talking, just playing our game”

Waller, who has offers from D-IIs East Stroudsburg and Georgian Court, is a ferocious slasher, and adept finisher, more comfortable pushing the ball up the floor and going right into defenders than spotting up for three. He also plays with an intensity on defense that matches the team’s propensity to trap and pick up ball handlers at full court.

“We knew Manir was gonna be a heck of a player this year,” Abington’s 10th-year head coach Charles Grasty said “He’s not coming down forcing 20, 25 shots. He’s playing within the scope of the offense and he’s working hard, he's being a leader.”

Waller is joined in the starting five by fellow senior, sharpshooter Joey Brusha, football star Caleb Baker, smooth-shooting and athletic point guard Robert Bell, and wing Oreck Frazier, another football standout with an offer from Temple.

Most of the Ghosts’ rotation saw little-to-no playing time during the program’s years of dominance, and Grasty is eager to shape them into a contender. 

“I hear people giving me little remarks about ‘now you’ll have to coach’ and all that kind of stuff,” said Grasty, who picked up his 200th victory against Central Bucks East on Wednesday. “We’ve coached for the last 10 years regardless of who we had or who we didn’t have, we’ve always had to coach, our staff has always had worked their butts off, and our guys are buying in. 

“Our guys are saying ‘it’s our turn.’”

Grasty has instilled a slogan for the year, addressing the “outsiders” dismissing the Ghosts’ prospects at another title: “Why not us?”

“They hear it, they hear ‘Abington’s not that good this year’ our guys, they hear it all the time,” Grasty said. “Everybody’s talking about that our ten seniors are gone and we can’t compete for a league title, we’re not going to compete for a district championship…

“Why can’t we compete for all those things? We work just as hard as everyone else. We worked our tails off just like anybody else, so why not us?”

The doubters card may be the oldest sports cliche in the book, but it is an undoubtedly effective motivator. The attitude reflects the assertiveness with which Grasty’s squad plays. 

In Wednesday’s contest against CB East, Abington (3-1, 2-0 SOL-American) came out with the intentions of running the Patriots off the floor by trapping and swarming them on every defensive possession. The strategy seemed to backfire, as CB East’s many competent ball handlers were able to take Abington’s aggression and turn it into open shots, creating a double digit lead late in the third. 

However, come crunchtime the Ghosts were able to cause turnover after turnover, many coming from Waller himself. Abington eventually pulled out a 66-63 overtime win. 

According to Waller, the team’s hard-nosed ethos came from a mandate Grasty gave prior to the season. 

“Coach told us at the beginning of this year we would have to be a scrappy team,” Waller said. “So we want to make that our identity: a scrappy, tough, physical team.”

In a season immediately following a historic stretch of success, Abington has found its identity as a bruising and attacking defensive squad, and its leader in a humble Homecoming King.