City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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For Gregg Downer, Saturday’s District 1 Class 6A boys championship is a chance at long-awaited revenge.

It was Downer’s senior year at Penncrest High School when he and his Lions went up against Norristown, led by future NFL quarterback Steve Bono, and fell short, 59-53, against the Eagles in the 1980 district championship.

“I can remember how good Steve Bono was and how exciting it was for me, a Philadelphia kid, to play at the Palestra, how crowded the gym was,” Downer recalled by phone Thursday night. “It’s the one game in my career when I came out of the tunnel where I couldn’t find my parents.

“I’ve been waiting 42 years to get another crack at Norristown,” the Lower Merion head coach added.

Saturday night at Temple University’s Liacouras Center, Downer’s going to have his chance, when his second-seeded Aces will attempt to defend their district title against the upstart No. 12 seed Eagles, who are on the verge of pulling off a championship run almost no one saw coming.

Norristown took the entire 2020-21 season off due to COVID, meaning Binky Johnson’s Eagles were very much under the radar coming into this year, a largely-unproven group whose members were on the junior varsity and freshman rosters the last time they could play for the school. They took some lumps early on, losing to La Salle by 21 and Carroll by 36, plus a 25-point defeat to Methacton on Jan. 8, but started to figure things out during the second half of the season. 

Since Jan. 20, a span of 14 games, Norristown’s gone 12-2, losing only to Spring-Ford in the regular season and Methacton by five in the PAC semifinals. They got revenge on that latter loss in the district semifinals, knocking off the Warriors for the first time in four tries this season, doing it at the time it mattered most.

“It was really beyond emotion, it was psychological,” Johnson said. “Talking to some of our players, they were really mentioning that they never beat Methacton since they played varsity, and I didn’t even realize that. 

“They were extra tuned in for the task, they were like how can (Methacton) be a rival if we’ve never beaten them? They really honed in on the fact that they wanted to beat Methacton that bad, and had that much determination there that night.”

Johnson, who starred at Norristown in the late 1980s, leading the Eagles to a district title in 1990, returned to coach at his alma mater in 2017. That was two years after Norristown moved from the Suburban One League into the Pioneer Athletic Conference, nine years after the Eagles were last in the district championship, a 2008 defeat to Chester. 

His current group is senior-laden, including his son, 6-3 wing guard D.J. Johnson, who’s garnering interest from several D-II and D-III programs, as well as classmates Zaki Gomez, John Dinolfi and Righteous Mitchell, who scored 20 points in the semifinal victory, with Dinolfi adding 11 and Gomez 10, Johnson scoring eight points with six steals.

Sophomore guard Myon ‘Mister’ Kirlew has also come on strong as the season’s gone on, a 3-point specialist with an increasing tendency to attack the hoop, while 6-5 senior forward Rayshon Stinson and guard Nassir Williams give them additional depth. 

“They’re hot at the right time,” Downer said. “Very athletic, very feisty on defense, balanced scoring [...] Binky’s son’s a good player, plays very good defense. Just the type of athleticism and grit and determination that you would expect to see from any Norristown team.

“When you think of District 1 basketball, you think of Chester, Norristown, Plymouth, probably us,” the Aces’ longtime coach added, “and they’ve got the legacy, and those kids, they like to win, and I think a lot of them, if not all of them, grow up wanting to play for the Eagles.”

“Their attitude’s the same as it’s been all year,” Johnson said. “They believe in themselves, they believe in our culture, our culture that we built for our basketball program, it took us a while to re-instill it from a year off, but once you buy into the culture of a program like we have here in Norristown, it really can show you what a program can do not just for the basketball program, what it can do for the school and the community.”

“Unfortunately, they didn’t play last year, but now the fact that they bought in and see the results of it, it makes it even more delightful to know that the system and the program still works — the culture of having discipline, structure, and the ability to belong to something means a lot for young men. And winning is just icing on the cake.”

Downer’s 2021-22 squad features three starters back from last year’s district title squad, his first since Kobe Bryant led the Aces to the 1996 crown (before that, Lower Merion’s last district title had been in 1978, over Bono and Norristown). Senior forward Demetrius Lilley, senior guard Jaylen Shippen and junior guard Sam Brown are the primary defensive worries for the Eagles, but junior guards Sam Wright and Justin Poles can knock down shots as well.

Lilley, bound for Penn State in the fall, dropped a 20-point, 24-rebound double-double in the semifinal win over previously-unbeaten No. 3 seed Cheltenham, an output that’s not quite typical for the 6-9 post but not outrageous, either. A terrific rebounder and excellent around-the-rim finisher who sees the floor well with the ball in his hands, Lilley is also an adept shooter out to the 3-point arc with his feet set, and can put the ball on the floor in the open court.

“He’s a dominant big man — there’s no ifs, ands or buts about it, he’s dominant in every fact of the game,” Johnson said. “He’s big, he’s strong, he’s smart. When you have that type of impact, you just want to do the best you can on him that night and hope he has an off night.”

Brown, a 6-3 left-hander with offers from Penn and Albany, finished with 19 points in the semifinal win over Cheltenham, knocking down three second-half 3-pointers. He and Lilley, along with the 6-3 Wright and 6-0 Shippen, give the Aces the athleticism to hang with Norristown, but Downer won’t hesitate to slow the game down and control the tempo if needed, spreading the floor and forcing Norristown to come out and guard them.

“You see the same thing you see on every Downer team: very disciplined, well-coached team — he’s a Hall of Fame coach for a reason, he’s been doing this for a long time,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to bring not only your A game, you’ve got to bring your A+ game when you play Lower Merion, every time you play them, because they’re so well-coached.”

While Lower Merion has the extra season of experience, not to mention the ‘been-there’ factor of last year’s run, the place neither team has been is the Liacouras Center. Temple’s on-campus arena seats 10,000 when full, and while it’s unlikely that many will be there Saturday, a crowd of several thousand in a cavernous arena is a new look for all involved.

For the Aces to win back-to-back district titles for the first time since the 1940s, they’ll have to shake off some bad history in the building.

“It’s been a little bit of a haunted gym for us, we probably have a sub-.500 record there,” Downer said. “We bumped into some really good Plymouth [Whitemarsh] teams, we bumped into [Abington’s] Eric Dixon twice there, [Coatesville’s Jhamir] Brickus twice there — we’re just losing to some tremendous Division I players, some of the best players the district has ever seen. 

“We’re not going to talk about it much, and the only thing I’m going to tell them is we’re expecting to have 10-foot rims.”