City of Basketball Love

By Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Cordell Lord’s been preparing to take over North Penn’s boys basketball program for more than a dozen years. 

The 26-year-old -- who celebrates his birthday on Friday -- played at the massive Montgomery County high school, starting for head coach John Conrad from his sophomore year onwards. After a collegiate playing career, he spent the last five years working on his coaching abilities, including the last two under Conrad at his alma mater. 

So when Conrad announced in June that he was stepping down after 13 seasons and more than 300 wins, Lord was ready. After going through the interview process during the summer — while running the Knights’ workouts the whole time — he was officially named head coach earlier this week.

“Definitely a full-circle moment,” he told CoBL. “I’m still collecting all the thoughts about it., but the key things I can say right now: full-circle moment, I’m extremely blessed, extremely humbled, extremely thankful.”

Lord was born in New York, but spent all of his formative years in North Wales, moving down to the Philadelphia area when he was two years old. A basketball player from his early days thanks to his dad, former Gwynedd Mercy University assistant coach Corey Lord, Cordell grew up obsessed with hoops, a big fan of Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers.

“Growing up watching (Kobe) made me ecstatic about the game and grew a deep passion for it and deep love for it, [to] do something with it every day,” he said. “That’s still how I am today. Whether I’m playing or watching or coaching or drawing up plays, it doesn’t matter what it is, I’m always doing something basketball every day.”

He made the varsity team as a freshman at North Penn, then became a full-time starter as a sophomore, holding that position under Conrad for three seasons. The 5-foot-9 point guard got onto the roster at Immaculata University, staying on as head coach Jayson Hyman took over the Mighty Macs before his sophomore year. 

Lord said he began thinking about coaching during his senior year of high school, and spent some time coaching travel basketball when he was in college. But it wasn’t until his senior year at Immaculata, dealing with injury problems, that he really began thinking about what was next. 

Hyman put Lord in touch with West Chester University head coach Damien Blair, who was looking for a graduate assistant. Upon finishing up his dual degree in exercise science and sports management at IU, he enrolled at WCU in a master’s program of public administration and sports management. 

Lord spent the last five years as an assistant coach: two under Blair during his master’s program, one under Seth Brunner at Faith Christian, and the last two under Conrad back at North Penn. Between those stops, Lord feels like he got a well-rounded education on basketball, each of those coaches showing him a different aspect of the game.

From Hyman, he learned “the mentality and style of how the game is played today;” from Blair, who Lord called a “mastermind [...] of how his offense was run;” it was how to create offense without sets; Brunner’s best strength was his ability “to adjust on the fly to multiple things and make really good in-game adjustments.”

Lord (seated, left) on the bench during North Penn's PIAA 6A second-round appearance in March 2023. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Lord spent the last two seasons observing how Conrad ran the Knights program, knowing that he was being groomed to take over for Conrad, even if he wasn’t sure exactly how long that process would last.

“When I interviewed, one of the questions he asked me was ‘do you see yourself being a head coach?’,” Lord said, “and I told him I was extremely interested in being a head coach one day, but I’m also not someone that’s going to be stepping on any toes. 

“Throughout the two years, me and John had a lot of different conversations; he would ask me a lot of things about ‘how do you see this going for you,’ ‘when you take over.’ There was never really a definitive ‘I have one year left,’ or ‘I have two years left,’ it was just constant communication between me and him of how he was feeling and when he thought it was going to be his time.”

Conrad said that Lord always had a high basketball IQ from his high school years onwards, calling him an “energetic” high school freshman who “always had a passion for the game.” 

“From what I’ve seen over the past two years, I think he’s very good at communicating with the kids, they respond to him really well. He’s also good in the community, he grew up there, he knows North Penn. He obviously knows the game, but his biggest strength is to just be himself, he’ll have success.”

Under Conrad, North Penn was a regular threat for the Suburban One League Colonial Division title, making regular trips to the District 1 tournament. The program’s high-water mark came in 2022-23, when the Knights won 20 games and advanced to the PIAA Class 6A tournament, losing to Coatesville in a second-round thriller at Pottstown. 

Though it’s the largest school in District 1, with more than 3,000 students, the North Penn boys have never played for a district title on the hardwood. Plenty of the school’s other programs, including its football team, have been district champions multiple times. This past year, after a 4-8 start to the season, North Penn rallied to finish 12-11, losing to Cheltenham in the opening round of the District 1 6A playoffs. 

Lord knows success at North Penn means getting some of the school’s best athletes to join the basketball team, while also developing the youth program to add some more basketball-first student-athletes to the mix. Quite a few of the Knights’ hardwood stars in the last decade have been collegiate stars in football and baseball; Lord wants the district to produce more hoopers.

“I think development is something that’s really big, it’s been on my mind the last couple years,” he said. “I come from a family that does a lot of development in sports in general. Development is definitely key to success for a lot of teams in the first place. It doesn’t start when they get to the high school, it starts in the middle school and sometimes the grade school level. 

“I definitely plan on doing things with the younger groups, having them come out to different clinics [...]  just so they understand what we’re doing at the high school, what to expect at the high school and the level of commitment it takes to be a high school basketball player.”

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