City of Basketball Love

By Owen McCue (@Owen_McCue)
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As the rims rattled and nets swished during pick-up runs this summer, Sean Emfinger could tell the Montgomery County Community College men’s basketball team was in for some fun.

“It was a bunch of dunks, we were hitting threes. The chemistry was already there just based off talent,” said Emfinger, a first-year player from Cheltenham.

The Mustangs’ “highlight show,” as first-year coach Koran Prince described it, has continued into the winter, taken up a notch as Emfinger and his teammates are teaming up rather than going against each other.

An athletic Montco bunch that plays a fun fast-paced style has piled up a 24-1 record and a Top 5 spot in the National Junior College Athletic Association Division III rankings with the postseason set to begin.

After winning the program’s second Eastern Pennsylvania Athletic Conference in three years, the second-seed Mustangs head into the Region 19 tournament on Tuesday at home against seventh-seed Sussex County, their sights set on a regional then national title.

“You kind of have an idea when you’re recruiting, you start getting some commitments from kids and start thinking this is a special team,” Prince said. “But all that looks like that is on paper. In person, when you start to see them play, you say, ‘Alright. This may be a pretty good team.’ Then you start putting the practices in and plays, and you start to see something really special.”

Prince has been at Montco for more than a decade. He was a two-year starter at Kensington High School before suiting up for the Mustangs as a player in 2011-12. 

He had the opportunity to continue his basketball career at Penn State-Abington, but after his mom passed away and the birth of his daughter, he decided he didn’t want to keep playing hoops. Instead, he asked former coach Denny Surovec to join the Montco staff as a 21-year-old assistant in 2012-13.

Prince, 32, spent 10 seasons as an assistant under three head coaches — Surovec, Darby Callahan and Nyere Miller — before stepping up to the plate as the head coach this offseason when Miller left. He’s been helped by assistants Pete Chimera and Levi Sherriff.

“It takes time to be able to feel like you’re ready to take over,” Prince said. “Ten years of experience is the perfect amount. I was able to get that experience and say alright the time is now. When the opportunity arose, I wanted to make sure I was ready and I was. We created some type of success.”

Montco went 21-5 last season, losing in the second round of the region tournament. The team’s top three players Matt Compass (Dalton State), WIllie Anderson (William Penn) and Khalid Johnson (Paine College) all went onto to play at the NCAA level. 

While Prince had a few key returners set to come back in sophomores Cris DiNolfi (Norristown), Ty Jones (Upper Merion) and Christian Renninger (Boyertown), the vision for what this group could accomplish started to form when he saw RareFootage highlight videos of 6-foot-5 super athletic guard Baasil Saunders at Imhotep and eventually lured him to campus.

Montco men's basketball players, from left, Sean Emfinger (Cheltenham), Baasil Saunders (Imhotep) and Chris DiNolfi (Norristown) are three of the standouts for the 24-1 Mustangs. (Photo: Owen McCue/CoBL)

Saunders was a reserve at Imhotep last season after averaging double figures at Bonner the year prior. He’s averaging 12.9 ppg, 3.1 apg and 7.2 rpg in his first college season, earning first team all-region honors as a freshman.

“I wasn’t highly recruited coming out, so I just wanted to go a place where I can build my confidence and just build myself up again,” Saunders said. 

“He told me that we had a good group of guys, and he just wanted me to lead them. That’s all, be a leader, point guard, keep everybody in line.”

The Mustangs have the No. 19 scoring offense in NJCAA Division III (84.5 ppg) along with boasting the No. 3 defense (64.8 ppg). Saunders is one of four double-figure scorers along with Emfinger (19.6 ppg, 3.2 apg, 71. rpg), DiNolfli (13.9 ppg, 3.0 apg) and freshman Brandon Bush (13.4 ppg, 7.3 rpg), from Cheltenham.

Montco won its first 10 games before a 62-60 Dec. 16 loss at Northampton. The Mustangs haven’t lost since returning to action in January, winning 14 straight games, including a 78-58 revenge win over Northampton. They’re already tied for the most wins in a season since the program was reinstated in 2008-09.

“I feel like when we lost to Northampton we became a team,” said DiNolfi, whose younger brother John is also on the team. "That’s when we really tapped in, and we were like, ‘We want to win a championship.’”

Emfinger was on Cheltenham’s District 1 runner-up team in 2020, then went to Lackawanna College, a JUCO in Scranton, Pa., before returning home and spending time around the team during a gap year in 2022-23.

After jelling with his new teammates in the offseason, a preseason ankle injury kept him out the entire first semester. He returned with a six-point outing Jan. 13 against Harrisburg Area. He’s reached double figures in all 12 games since, including a 30-point outing against Delaware County and three straight 20-point performances heading into the playoffs.

“Baasil was carrying a lot of the load, so once I came in, he got somebody else to rely on because they kind of took him away toward the end of the first half of the season," Emfinger said. "Now, we got extra guys likes Brandon, Chris, myself.”

The Mustangs claimed the first first region title in program history in 2020 before heading to the NJCAA Division III championship tournament, where they lost both of their games.

They think this team is capable of more.

“I haven’t lost yet and I’m not looking to,” Emfinger said. “That’s why I’m trying to motivate them to just keep it pushing, especially in practice because right now we’re looking to be the greatest Montco team in the last decade. That motivation is there for us to win a national championship and region championship.”

Top seed Brookdale College (N.J.), ranked No. 1 in the country at 24-0 looks to be the biggest obstacle in the Mustangs' path. Brookdale ended Montco's season in the second round of regionals last season. The two teams were supposed to match up in the final game of the regular season before a pregame altercation forced it to be ruled a no contest.

Montco will need wins Tuesday and Thursday to reach Saturday's championship game.

“I got confidence in my team,” DiNolfi said. “I feel like we can get it all. I feel like we keep getting closer and closer. Every game, every practice, we’re becoming a family even more.”