City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Olivia Jones’ voice was gone.

That was understandable. The high school junior-to-be had just spent the previous two hours using it at the top of her lungs: on the court, guiding her Philly Rise teammates around or on the bench, shouting encouragement; certainly afterwards, when she was celebrating a huge, come-from-behind win on national TV.

“It’s crazy,” she said of the experience, and of her social media feed afterwards. “It was really crazy just to see myself on ESPN, especially, at the age I’m at right now.”

With the central Pennsylvania native and new Westtown guard making huge plays down the stretch, Philly Rise’s 16s won the Nike Nationals 16U championship, the girls’ Nike EYBL title, downing Missouri Phenom 60-53 in Monday afternoon game in Chicago televised on ESPN-U.

Philly Rise 16U poses after winning the Nike Nationals 16U championship on Sunday. (Photo: Courtesy Nike Girls EYBL)

That capped off a multi-month journey which saw the Rise perform well in tournaments in Virginia and Texas in April and May, then went 3-0 in pool play in Chicago to earn a spot in the top bracket in the tournament championships. Beginning with a 20-point win over Team Durant on Saturday evening, Rise’s 16s ran that perfect record to 7-0 to take it all home, the second year in a row Rise’s 16s took home the title; this year’s Rise 17s finished in fifth place.

It didn’t look like the trophy would come back to Philly for a while, as Missouri Phenom opened up a nine-point lead in the third quarter behind the sharp shooting of Elli Porter (18 points) and Asia Lee (10 points), but Rise responded, shaking off some early foul trouble to surge late, winning the fourth quarter 18-3.

“It was such a great experience,” Jones said. “I think that just being down and going through the adversity of the refs just calling so many fouls, which we hadn’t seen all weekend, it was good for us to go through that experience and to see what that was like and to push through all the way to the end.”

Jones, who’s coming to Westtown after two standout years at Cedar Cliff, came up with the two biggest plays of the game to cap off a 12-point, 10-rebound (seven offensive) outing. 

First was a put-back layup with under 90 seconds to play, which put the Rise up five, the offensive-rebounding specialist in perfect position to grab the carom, nobody in front of her to stop her from popping it right back into the hoop.

““I’m going to give my dad his props right here,” she said. “He’s always telling me to follow the ball and I know throughout the game, in the beginning, they were doing a good job of boxing me out [...] I was like, ‘I’m going to get this rebound one way or the other — if she makes it, she makes it, but if she doesn’t, I’m here.’”

A minute later, Jones’ knockdown 3-pointer off a feed from Olivia Vukosa made it a seven-point gap, 58-51 with 31 seconds to play. Ball game.

“I knew once she hit that 3, that was when I started fist-pumping that we won a national championship,” Philly Rise founder Kevin Lynch said. “That was such a big shot in a big moment, she’s just so clutch. She’s just a leader, and just somebody that we can count on.”

Game MVP and fellow Westtown standout Jordyn Palmer finished with a game-high 16 points, Vukosa (Christ the King, N.Y.) adding 11, seven boards and three blocks as the Rise overcame a sharpshooting Missouri squad which took the lead in the second quarter and built it to double digits early in the third. 

Rise battled back after Palmer settled down from early foul trouble, the 6-foot-1 wing and rising freshman at Westtown showing why she’s one of the best high school prospects regardless of class by getting her 16 points in just 15 minutes of action, going 5-of-7 from the floor and 6-of-9 from the foul line, most of that coming in the second half. Her step-through and left-hand finish — plus the harm — put Rise on top for good, 51-50, with five minutes to play. 

“Jordyn is such a huge part of our team, and just her athleticism and ability to get to the rim on those bigger bigs and her quickness and her coordination, just to finish through contact as well, it’s just amazing,” Jones said of her current and future teammate. “And she’s so young.”

Vukosa, a 6-foot-4 rising sophomore and one of the top five players in the country in her class, showed why she’s got offers from every big-time country in the program. The skilled post was an elite defender against Phenom star Jayda Porter, holding the younger sister of NBA star Michael Porter Jr. — like her, a 6-4 rising sophomore — to eight points and two rebounds, flashing her offensive game by knocking down a mid-range jumper and a beautiful right-hand finish after a spin.

“I was really nervous at first, but once I started playing, I realized it’s just like any other game, and all we’ve got to do is win,” she said after her 11-point, seven-rebound outing. “Feels great, feels like I’m on top of the world.”

This won’t be Vukosa’s only new experience on a major stage this summer: she’ll head to Croatia on Saturday to train for the FIBA Europe U-16 girls’ championships next month in Turkey. The rest of the Philly Rise program will go to tournaments in Florida this week and in Memphis the week after, wrapping up their travel season. 

While Palmer, Jones and Vukosa accounted for more than half the team’s scoring, it was a full-team effort to get it done this weekend. Audenried Charter rising junior Shayla Smith contributed seven points and seven boards; Westtown rising sophomore Atlee Vanesko knocked down two early 3-pointers. Kailah Correa (Lebanon), Kaylinn Bethea (Penn Charter), Haylie Adamski (Garnet Valley) and Grace Galbavy (Perkiomen Valley) all saw big minutes, and that’s without wing Jada Lynch (St. Rose, N.J.), off playing with the Belgian U-16 national team.

“It’s a really solid, complete team, because they all are very good all-around players,” Lynch said. “And the camaraderie that they have with each other makes such a big difference in close games. They just don’t know how to lose, they just won’t lose.”