City of Basketball Love

Owen McCue (@Owen_McCue)
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Ursinus women’s basketball sophomore Chinwe Irondi likes to call herself a 'walk-on'.

Of course at the Division III level, no one is on scholarship, but Irondi was never technically recruited to the Bears (even though other college programs did covet her services coming out of St. Mary’s Ryken in Maryland).

Irondi’s focus was to find a school that fit her academically. Her older sister attended Swarthmore and noted nearby Ursinus as a college she should add to her list of schools to look into.

After deciding to choose the small college in Collegeville for academic purposes, Irondi emailed former Ursinus head coach Margaret White with some film inquiring about possibly playing hoops for the Bears and got an excited reply back.

“I was recruited to a couple of different schools, but my philosophy and my family’s philosophy was college is about the academics,” Irondi said. “If I went to a team that was really great, but I was miserable in every other aspect it would be a waste of four years for me. I wanted to go somewhere where I felt at home, that the curriculum was something that I believed in, and Ursinus filled all of those slots, and I get to play basketball with some great kids.”

White left Ursinus to coach at Marymount in Virginia prior to the start of last season. Longtime Haverford College coach Bobbi Morgan took over in October just weeks before the season

Morgan was familiar with several players on Ursinus’ roster from either coaching against them or recruiting them at Haverford. Irondi wasn’t one of them.

Having an all-conference 6-foot-1 freshman forward was simply an extra perk of the job.

“I did not know Chinwe,” Morgan said. “She was not on my radar, shame on me, but she’s tremendous.”

“She calls herself a walk-on. I would say that’s not true. She’s great and the best thing about her is she’s incredibly humble. She’s a great leader. I was trying to get her not to pass too much last year. I was like, ‘You can finish.’ She’s just so humble, incredibly humble. She’s becoming a great leader though. She’s starting to find her presence on the court.”

Irondi is an economics major with a minor in finance — an impressive academic resume.

She also might be one of the most productive ‘walk-ons’ in college basketball. As a freshman last season, Irondi averaged 15.2 ppg and 9.9 rpg to earn Centennial Conference Rookie of the Year and First Team All-Centennial Conference honors.

Irondi posted 10 double-doubles, including a 22-point, 20-rebound performance against Muhlenberg. She ranked fourth in the Centennial in scoring, rebounding and field goal percentage (43.8).

Her 2022-23 follow-up campaign began Wednesday at Immaculata similarly with a 22-point outing in a 65-55 win for the Bears. Consecutive baskets late in the second half and a block in the final minute by Irondi helped Ursinus pull away in the season opener.

“I think I bring a bit of energy and confidence to the team,” Irondi said. “I try my best to be pretty emotionally stable. Things in games are going to go up and they’re going to go down, people are going to go on runs. I think I’m pretty good at kind of staying stable because basketball is a game of runs. When great things you gotta be able to still keep your calm. When bad things happen, you gotta be calm.”

Morgan is calling this season Year One for herself at Ursinus. After leaving Haverford College, Morgan planned on coaching at Agnes Irwin before the Ursinus job opened in the fall and she was given a hard pitch by the athletic department to take it.

She didn’t take over until October and then had to coach a team of players who she didn’t know that had very little experience following the COVID canceled 2020-21 season, leading to a 5-20 mark.

“It really was a learning opportunity for Bobbi and for us,” Irondi said. “It was our first year back from COVID too. Everyone was kind of very new to everything. I think figuring out things as a team, even as a coach, everyone was just trying to get a grasp of what basketball would look like in that year.”

Irondi started all 25 games last season, guard/forward Gabby Downs (6.2 ppg, 3.5 rpg) started 24 games, junior point guard Kelly Grant (4.1 ppg, 4.1 rpg) started 21 games, and five others started eight-or-more games. Downs is the is the only significant contributor gone from last season.

Junior guard Natalie Mehl averaged 6.8 ppg in 12 games (eight starts) last season and had the hot hand on Wednesday night with 19 points (five threes). 

Junior guard Maria D'Aulerio (Nazareth Academy), junior guard Alison Lisanti, junior guard Sarah DiLello (Germantown Academy) and junior guard Alyssa Martin (Gwynedd Mercy) all had turns as starters while senior forward Margrett Brown and junior guard Katie McCusker averaged double-digit minutes per game last season.

“It’s unbelievably different,” Morgan said. “The first game last year, I felt like nobody knew what they were doing. We had three weeks together. This year, it’s just like there’s a whole year of people where nothing’s new. You start to see things coming together as opposed to thinking. They were thinking when they were playing.”

Ursinus’ first win this season came a lot quicker than last season when the Bears dropped their first four games (including a 71-65 loss to Immaculata).

Irondi said with so much experience and being bothered by some of the losses from last season, Ursinus will play with a toughness that it didn’t possess last season.

“I think last year we were kind of new,” Irondi said. “Even our coach was new. Everything was deer in the headlights. This year, we have a year of experience under our belts. We have a lot of new people as well, but I think just experience is something that gives us more of an edge than we had last year.”

Morgan racked up a 195-120 record, three Centennial Conference championships and four NCAA Tournament appearances during her 13 seasons at Haverford College. The Fords went to the tournament in her final three seasons there, which included two conference titles as well.

There were no regrets last season as the losses piled up. Her daughter Reilly was on campus, finishing up her lacrosse career at Ursinus and that was something no other coaching opportunity could have provided.

She also has experience building programs from the ground up and knows what it takes to get things moving in the right direction again and felt her players buying in last season.

“Having done this before, starting with a program that kind of needs to be brought back up again, the goal is always to be in every game and learn how to finish games and learn how to win close games,” Morgan said. “That’s how you become good. That’s how you take that next step. My goal for them is I want to be in every game and I want to say, ‘If you play well, you can beat this team.’

“When I was at Haverford, that’s what we did. They’d had one winning season in 30 years. I’m like. ‘Let’s just be in this game.’ And then all of a sudden we’re in every game, and they’re like. ‘Oh, OK.’ That’s the goal.”

The Bears have a combined 12 wins in their most recent two seasons of action (2019-20 and 2021-22), but Ursinus is only a handful of seasons removed from a 17-10 campaign in 2018-19.

Taking down a 2022 NCAA Tournament team in their first game of the season should inspire some confidence in this group, though Irondi hinted the internal expectations for the Bears were already optimistic.

“I think last year was a hard year for us, and I think a lot of people are going to underestimate us, which we’re going to use that to our advantage,” Irondi said. “I’m just very excited to play this year.”