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Westtown's Dereck Lively II living up to family hoops legacy

06/24/2021, 10:30pm EDT
By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Kathy Drysdale remembers the first time she realized Dereck Lively II’s full potential.

“It hit me his sophomore year, his home opener, the first game of the season,” she said. “I walk in and I’m looking in for (him), and I’m like ‘where is he, is he okay?’ I didn’t see him out there, but he was right in front of me. He had a different hairdo, he just looked grown up. 

“I watched him that whole weekend, and I’m like ‘Oh my God, he’s going to be pretty good.”


Dereck Lively II (above) has developed into one of the country's top hoops prospects. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

A terrific ballplayer herself, Drysdale had starred at Penn State in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, scoring more than 1,000 points for the Nittany Lions and helping them to a No. 1 national ranking during her junior year. She knew then that the young man she was watching in the Moose uniform, the one she’d driven down from State College to see, had the potential to dwarf her hoops accomplishments, lofty as they are. He already towered over her 6-foot-3 frame.

“I was like, ‘Damn, you’re tall,’” she recalled thinking of seeing the 7-foot-1 center. 

Drysdale was impressed by Lively’s update and how hard he played, scoring the opening bucket that night in what was both his first high school start and appearance. She was well aware of the progress he’d made over the years, since taking hoops more seriously beginning as a middle schooler. But most of all, she was proud of her son.

“His journey, in our eyes, is far from over,” she said, “but we still have to take it one day at a time.”

The only child of Drysdale and Dereck Lively, a chef, Dereck Lively II was born tall — Drysdale said he was a full two feet at birth, and never had a growth spurt but just kept on growing. By middle school, Lively had played basketball for fun but started to take it more seriously, joining an AAU team in Altoona before switching over to Team Final later in middle school.

It was around that time that he really started to listen to the most serious hooper in the family. The director of marketing at Penn State for several of their athletics teams, Drysdale — who was then Kathy Phillips —  scored 1,295 points and grabbed 717 rebounds during a standout career for the Nittany Lions, and she’s still in the top 20 in both categories in program history. 

“When I was younger, I never really listened to her and I never listened to what she had to say,” Lively admitted, “but as I grew up I started to realize that I have one of the best basketball minds in the world in my living room.”

It was Drysdale who understood the way the game was going, understood that to be a high-level big man in the 21st century meant being as skilled as a guard a couple decades before.


Lively (above) has excelled this summer with Team Final and Westtown, drawing offers from Duke, UNC and Kentucky. (Photo: Mark Jordan/CoBL)

“You can’t just be a typical back-to-the basket type of player anymore, you’ve got to be multi-dimensional,” she said. “All the ball-handling drills, he was in there with everyone else. The shooting, and not just the easy ones but the 12-foot jumpers and then the 15-foot jumpers, and then who doesn’t like to take a 3-point shot?”

Lively’s time to shine took maybe just a little longer than it should have for being a 7-1 basketball unicorn. It’s not his fault: an ankle injury cost him his freshman year, and though he was clearly a big-time prospect as a sophomore, there were plenty other attention-getting Moose prospects — including current Oregon big man Franck Kepnang and Syracuse center Jon Bol Ajak — who were able to keep Lively still under the radar. 

Just when he was ready to really show what he could do on a national stage, COVID shut the hoops world down for the better part of a year. Westtown did play 24 games last season, going 19-5 against the likes of Phelps, Perkiomen, Rocktop and other prep schools as the Friends’ Schools League didn’t have a season or postseason. With coaches only able to watch on tape and few scouts or media out in gyms, Lively’s continued progress went largely unnoticed. 

But the rising senior at the Westtown School is certainly having his moment — and then some — this spring and summer. National scouts and coaches alike have done nothing but rave about Lively no matter where he’s played this offseason, from winning the Southern Jam Fest with Team Final to showing out at the Pangos All-American Camp earlier this month.

Even on a Final squad that features the top two prospects in the 2022 class (Jalen Duren and Emoni Bates), Lively is under-the-radar no more. He’s a force to be reckoned with.

“Definitely just been working on trying to show off what I can do, really, and really just have fun with the teams I’m playing with, that’s all I’m trying to do,” he said. “All the recognition I’m getting is just hard work paying off.”

During Westtown’s boys’ basketball workouts, fall of 2018, you couldn’t help but notice the tall, slender kid with the young face walking around in a medical boot, laughing and chatting with his teammates, launching the occasional shot when a ball bounced his way.

Once he got on the court, the traits that now make him one of the highest-ceiling prospects in the country became apparent: the ease with which he runs the floor and protects the rim; the fluidity for a young forward his size; his ability to step out and shoot from the 3-point arc, with a smooth form and high release. Of course, thanks to his mom, he also has a terrific understanding of the game and what it takes to succeed.

Lively (above) is an exceptional rim protector with leaping ability, timing and reach. (Photo: Mark Jordan/CoBL)
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“For me, the biggest determinant of that future potential is actually how quickly a kid learns,” Westtown coach Seth Berger said. “And I realized when I got on the court with him sophomore year, it’s like oh yeah, he’s a sponge. And he’s so good that he’s seeing some of the things we’re not teaching him.”

Berger, now going into his 15th season with the Moose, is no stranger to coaching high-level talent. Three former Westtown players have been NBA lottery picks: Georgios Papagiannis (No. 13 overall, 2016), Mo Bamba (No. 6, 2018) and Cameron Reddish (No. 10, 2019); Lively looks well on his way to being No. 4. 

And Berger knows Lively might have the highest potential out of any of them.

“I think Dereck has a combination of the best of all of these guys in him,” Berger said. “Cam was probably the most skilled, and Mo (had the) physical gifts, and George also had a very early understanding of the game. You put those three assets together into Dereck, he probably has the best of all three.”

At this point it seems a matter of not ‘if’ but ‘when’ Lively ends up playing at the highest levels of hoops, few athletes in the world matching his combination of size, athleticism, hoops IQ, motor and skillset, in addition to his still-untapped potential. 

If he goes the college route, Lively’s picture got slightly clearer on Thursday night, as he released his final seven schools: Duke, Florida State, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Penn State and Southern Cal. 

Speaking a week before he cut his list, after starring for Westtown at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Schools Shootout at the Hun School (N.J.), it sounded like Lively was focused on getting at least a year in at the college level and learning from one of the high-level staffs at the schools on his list before going to the NBA rather than go through the G League or new Overtime Elite League.

“I’m really trying to go to a place where I can develop my character and develop my brand, and develop as a person, really,” he said. “It’s a hard process because I can do that in many different colleges, so it’s definitely going to be hard to pick.

“It really just comes from how hands-on the coaching and coaching staffs are, just how much working and how much fine-tuning the simple things, the little things that come with basketball,” he added. “Not the crazy dunks, the crazy 3s and all that —  it’s mainly the footwork, the ball-handling, I’m just trying to get to a point where I’m perfecting every point of my game. That’s really what I’m looking for.”


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