City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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(Ed. Note: This story is part of CoBL’s “Prepping for Preps” series, which will take a look at many of the top high school programs in the region as part of our 2024-25 season preview coverage. The complete list of schools previewed thus far can be found here.)

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Walk through the doors of the Central Bucks East gym and to the left hangs the sports banners. They are blue, outlined in red, with white letters and numbers adorning each one to signify the special achievements of past players and teams. Under the Central Bucks East boys’ basketball banner lists the number of Suburban One League Colonial Division Championships. It is a little deceiving. It stops at 2021.

The last three Patriots’ teams know better, as does the current CB East team.

Quietly, it seems, the Patriots this season will be looking for a landmark fifth-straight SOL Colonial Division championship. Coach Erik Henrysen, who enters his 15th year, is one of the area’s most underrated coaches who has consistently built winners. The missing three years on the SOL Colonial championship banner may not show it, but this team is very aware of the legacy it has inherited—and they plan on following through as past CB East teams have done.

It will not be an easy climb back to the SOL Colonial top.

Henrysen lost almost his entire lineup to graduation, including 1,000-point scorer and first-team SOL Jake Cummiskey (Catholic University), Miles Demby (Del Val), a pair of second-team all-SOL selections, Tyler Dandrea and Dhruv Mukund, along with the graduation losses of Justin DiRoberto, Bryce Lolas and Ryan McDonald. The group represented CB East’s most successful graduation class in program history, winning 74 games and four-straight division championships.

That core made a nice run last season, going 20-9 overall and 12-4 in the SOL Colonial, outdistancing rival CB West by two games to win the regular-season title again, and reaching the SOL semifinals, where the Bucks got their revenge by knocking out CB East in the SOL tournament. Still, the Patriots’ regular season record earned them a first-round PIAA District 1 Class 6A tournament bye. CB East reached the district quarterfinals, where it lost to No. 2-seed West Chester Henderson, and earned a state playoff berth. There, the Patriots fell to District 3 No. 2-seed Chambersburg (72-41) in the opening round.

Henrysen does not have to spell out this team’s objectives. They may not exactly be spelled out on the walls, though they are blatant enough to see: Win an unprecedented fifth-straight Colonial Division title and capture the first PIAA state playoff victory in school history.

Although the Patriots were hit hard by graduation, they still have a lot to work with in returning 6-foot-4 senior forward Nolan Behm, a Pitt baseball commit who is attracting attention from Major League Baseball scouts, 6-1 senior guard Shane O’Hara-Jamison, 6-2 senior guard AJ Molnar and 6-3 senior forward Graham Smith. Other major contributors to watch include 6-1 junior forward Connor Mekanik, 5-11 junior guard Quinn White, 5-10 junior guard Henry Bartchak, 5-10 junior guard Jackson Lutz, 5-10 sophomore guard Quinn Slack, and 6-1 freshman guard Keegan Marascio.

It's a group that may be unproven against the rest of the SOL, but it is a solid nucleus that went up against last year’s seven seniors every day in practice. It’s why Henrysen likes this team’s chemistry, guard play and outside shooting. What will be difficult is replacing 99.9-percent of the offense that the seven graduating seniors provided, the bulk of which left with the 6-3 Cummiskey and 6-7 Demby.

“I think we have a pretty good corps of guys that can shoot the ball well and handle the ball,” Henrysen said. “Even though we are undersized, I think we will compete at a pretty high level. We don’t have that traditional center, but we do have four or five guys that will attack the glass. I think in the early going, as we are trying to establish a few things, the best part of what we have done so far is building that level of competition. We have won our division four years in a row and our seniors take great pride in that. They want to continue that tradition.

“Even though we won the league four years in a row, we have had different guys each year that needed to step up. This year, we are probably a little smaller than we are used to, but this team is hungry and motivated to keep this thing going.”

Behm will be the leader. He already has the utmost respect of the coaching staff and his teammates. With a Pitt scholarship and a ticket to play ACC baseball, he could have easily bypassed his senior year playing high school basketball and committed the time to offseason baseball training.

Instead, he decided to play with his buddies one last time.

“I’ve been playing baseball and basketball for as long as I can remember, and this is kind of crazy that this will be my last time playing organized basketball,” said Behm, who lettered three years in basketball and was a spot starter last season. “A lot of things are coming to an end for me, so I thought, ‘Why not, this is it, give it one more try with basketball with my friends.’ We won the Colonial my three years of high school and we’re not about to give that up. We want to build on last year. We can make history winning five-straight Colonial titles, and CB East has never won a state playoff game. We talk about doing things no one has ever done before. It will need to be a collective effort.”

O’Hara-Jamison agrees. He will be a first-year starter and welcomes a leadership role. He stressed that everyone remain on the same page. That will be vital to the Patriots’ success.

“We may have a different style of play, because we will be smaller than past years,” he said. “We have a good group of guys that will stay together. It will not matter if someone scores big one night and doesn’t the next night. It has to be all of us. It doesn’t matter who scores. Everyone will work on getting the ‘W.’ That’s all that matters. It does not matter what I get asked to do, I am going to do it. We have guys that are chippy and guys that can do it all. We know people doubt us. We like that.”

Like reminding the rest of the SOL Colonial Division which team has won the title the last four years, missing years on a gym banner or not.

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on BlueSky here.