City of Basketball Love

By Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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When John and Anna Camden spoke on the phone last winter, something they did frequently, the siblings weren’t just catching up with one another. They were lifting each other up.

Anna, a graduate student at the University of Richmond, was sitting the season out with a torn ACL, the first major injury of her career. She was in a new school, having transferred in from Penn State, in a new place, surrounded by people she was still getting to know. 

John, a junior at Virginia Tech, was in his third year of being stuck at the end of the bench, first at Memphis, and then with the Hokies. The former Archbishop Carroll standout knew he could play, but hadn’t really gotten a chance to prove what he can do at the collegiate level.

“Both of us had a lot of unknowns in our future, and the message we would continuously give to each other was just to get better a little every day,” Anna Camden said. “For me, that meant attacking my rehab, building my quad muscle back, supporting my teammates [...] for him, that might look like getting in the weight room, encouraging his teammates, taking the couple minutes that he might get in each game and making a meal out of it.

“I think something I said to him a lot was just to put one foot in front of the other, keep walking forward. The only time either one of us is going to mess up right now is if we stop moving forward.”

Neither of them did. And this season, both are reaping the benefits. 

John, now a graduate transfer himself at Delaware, is having the breakthrough collegiate season he’d dreamed of his whole life. Anna, healthy and playing a major role for unbeaten Richmond, is making the impact the Spiders had hoped for a year ago.

Separately but together, the Camdens are doing their thing, and doing it well.

“It’s been awesome, honestly,” John Camden said. “Her having a tough year last year with the ACL and then me not really getting the minutes that I was looking for, for us to be both thriving this year so far, it’s been amazing.”

~~~

Anna, 24, and John, 22, are the youngest two of Susan and Tex Camden’s four children, all of whom played collegiate sports. Older sisters Megan (27) and Heather (26) both played lacrosse as their chosen sports, Megan at Ohio State and Heather at Drexel. The younger two took to hoops quickly, and stuck with it. 

In middle school, with Anna already at most of her 6-foot-3 frame as an eighth grader and John a couple years and inches behind her, they teamed up together, to great results. 

“John would play up and I would play in the boys’ leagues, so that we could be on the same team,” Anna recalled, “and we would run that league, like run it. And then there would be people complaining about a girl playing in the boys league, because we were killing people.”

“She’d be dominating,” John agreed. “Kids on other teams would be mad that she was blocking their shots and things like that. Those were great memories — I didn’t even realize it much at the time, but looking back, it’s so cool that we would play on each other’s teams.”

Anna Camden went to the Shipley School, where the 6-foot-3 wing was a three-star recruit. She ended up at Penn State, where she started 58 games and played in 111 games over the course of four years. Her best season came as a sophomore, when she averaged 7.8 ppg and 3.3 rpg in 24 games (23 starts), but the Nittany Lions never broke .500 when she was there. 

She hit the transfer portal after her senior year, “thankful” for her time at Penn State — “I will always in my heart be a Penn Stater,” she said — but looking for somewhere she could contribute to a winner. She found that at Richmond, which had won 21 games under Aaron Rousell in 2022-23 and seemed primed for a breakthrough.

John’s journey was a little less straightforward. He started out at the Westtown School as a freshman, played the next two years at Archbishop Carroll before finishing at Brewster Academy during the COVID season. 

By the time he committed to Memphis in October 2020, he was a consensus top-150 recruit, a 6-8 wing with intriguing upside and a smooth outside shot. Expectations, internally and externally, were sky-high.

“(The Memphis coaches) said ‘we’re going to put you in that position to be successful, you’re going to be on the floor as a freshman and you’re going to be surrounded by other really good players,’” Camden told CoBL at the time.

~~~

The Richmond women did indeed take a massive leap last year, winning 29 games and making the program’s first March Madness trip since 2005, but Anna Camden was barely part of it. 

“(It was) the very first day of summer workouts. I had not been on campus for more than 24 hours, and we were 30 minutes in and I tore my ACL,” she said. “It was our first live drill, [...] I was driving from the top of the key, I planted to spin back to my left and my knee just hyperextended and popped.

“I was obviously in a lot of pain, but it was the first day, I didn’t know anyone, so I was just embarrassed,” she continued. “I was the girl that was on the floor crying on the first day, and I was mortified. I was like, ‘I’m being dramatic, I’m fine, I’m being dramatic, I’m fine.’ And both my trainer and the men’s trainer felt my knee and were like ‘Anna, you’ve got to see a doctor in the morning,’ and I was like ‘oh, shoot, this could actually be a problem.’”

Her left ACL was torn, needing surgery, her season over almost literally before it even got started. Camden said she waited a couple months to have the surgery, wanting to get acclimated to a new city and new people before she was indefinitely incapacitated. 

She wasn’t sure yet that her college playing days would extend, planning on getting into a career in broadcasting after her eligibility was up, but ultimately chose to come back and utilize her extra year of eligibility.

What she wasn’t going to do was doing it while putting up with a bulky knee brace. 

“I’ve played with a lot of teammates that have gone through this injury, and so I’ve watched a lot of people’s recovery journeys, watched a lot of people be crippled by fear, married to their knee brace,” she said. “I absolutely refused to have any of that hold me back, I made a decision from the jump, fear was not going to run this recovery, I didn’t even entertain those thoughts. 

When I would have a thought of ‘oh my gosh, what if I get hurt again?’ I would catch that thought and throw it out of my mind.”

Anna Camden said she and Richmond’s athletic trainer Sara Spencer — whom she called “my favorite person ever,” and wasn’t being sarcastic — had “a lot of arguments” about the brace, with the standard to wear it for at least three months. They compromised on two weeks with the brace.

“And with her blessing, because I had all the quad strength, all the flexion I could possibly need, I got out of it and I never put it on since,” she said.

“She’s always been very fearless, very bold,” her brother said, “so in a way it didn’t surprise me at all because I know she’s been itching to get back out there, and itching to get back to the player she could be.”

~~~

While his sister was enjoying her time at Penn State, John’s college career wasn’t nearly as smooth. His undergraduate campaign took him from Memphis (2021-22) to Virginia Tech (2022-24) and then to Delaware, spending a lot of time practicing and watching from the sidelines.. 

Camden appeared in only 38 games in his first three seasons of college basketball, averaging fewer than two points and seven minutes per game, never more than a deep reserve as a Tiger or Hokie. Several injuries slowed him down as well.

“I didn’t get quite the opportunities that I was looking for, but [I’m] still super-grateful for my time there,” he said of his previous schools. “I grew a lot as a player and a person. Grateful for my whole journey.”

At Delaware, John Camden has finally started to realize the potential he showed so often in his prep years. He hadn’t scored in double figures in a game since his prep year at Brewster Academy, then did it in his first game in a Blue Hens jersey, dropping 19 against Bucknell. 

His sister was playing that same night, Richmond visiting Temple for its own season opener, Anna scoring nine points with five rebounds and three assists in 21 minutes. She didn’t get to watch that one; a couple days later, she was able to see the final couple minutes of Delaware’s win over Iona after running off the court of a game of her own. 

Anna was watching the entirety of Delaware’s game against Bryant on Monday, November 18 — a good thing, considering John dropped a career-high 27 points on 10-of-16 shooting, hitting 4-of-6 from downtown.

“When he made the second 3, I was like, ‘alright he’s about to go off,” she said with a laugh. “Not that I didn’t think he was already going to do that, but when he was 2-for-2 and I saw him give a little flex after his second 3 in the corner, I was like alright, he’s feeling it, this is going to be his night.”

~~~

This season has been the one they’ve been waiting their whole lives for.

John Camden’s been Delaware’s best player out of the gate, leading the team in scoring (17.7 ppg) while averaging 4.2 rpg, with only five turnovers through six games. Six days after the Delaware game, John set his personal bar higher, scoring 30 against Yale.

His sister couldn’t be more proud. 

“For John, this is just the beginning, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “People have no idea what he’s capable of and how much heart and work he has put into this game and his craft. I’m just so excited for him and I’m so proud of him.”

Anna Camden has been Richmond’s top reserve, averaging 6.9 ppg and 3.5 rpg for a Spiders squad picked to win the Atlantic 10 and defend its crown from a year ago. Richmond’s already off to an 8-0 start to the year, taking down Oklahoma State over the weekend, another win coming over an excellent Fairfield squad, a few other wins by 40 or 50 points.

“Her team has just been dominating teams,” John said. “It’s been unreal, some of the blowouts they’ve had. It’s awesome to see her doing so well and her team dominating so far.”

Of course, the two’s success hasn’t just boosted them, but the entire Camden clan.

“The amount of support from our older two sisters and our parents has been awesome,” John said. “They’re always hyping us up, texting us before every game, watching every game, and showing so much support despite them all having jobs and being super-busy in their own lives.”

Anna will play two more games in Philadelphia this year, Richmond traveling to both La Salle (Feb. 5) and Saint Joseph’s (March 1), giving the whole Camden family a couple chances to see her play locally. That’s less of a problem with John, whose Blue Hens are less than an hour from Downingtown. He also plans on utilizing his extra year of eligibility from his redshirt freshman year, so his career will not end this spring. 

They still have those phone conversations, sibling to sibling. They’re a lot happier now, the frustrations of the 2023-24 season washed away on the court. An already-close sibling bond made closer by that shared experience, and they’ve come out better for it on the other side.

“To have someone to lean on for support and just to have someone I knew was in my corner and someone who has been through a lot of similar stuff that I’ve been through, to have someone to lean on in those times, it meant a lot, and I think we were just always there for each other,” John Camden said. “We really helped each other through it all, for sure.”