City of Basketball Love

By David Comer (@dhcomer-cobl)
—

LAWRENCEVILLE, N.J. - It was the fall of 2019, and Tariq Ingraham was a freshman at Wake Forest University. On this day, he woke before sunrise for a 6 AM preseason practice with his new team and his new coaches in a new place. Soon, though, what started out like just another day in the life of a Division I college basketball player would turn into one Ingraham will never forget.

Ingraham had arrived weeks earlier on the Wake Forest campus in Winston-Salem, N.C., roughly 450 miles from his home in Delaware. He brought with him impressive credentials. During a stellar career at Bonner-Prendergast, he scored more than 1,000 points and as a senior earned second-team all-Philadelphia Catholic League honors and helped lead the Friars to a District 12 championship and an appearance in the PIAA Class 4A title game. 

The college coaches liked Ingraham’s game. He was a powerful 6-foot-9, 255-pounder with a soft touch and quick moves in the post to go along with a positive attitude. In the end, Danny Manning, the legendary University of Kansas player and first pick in the 1988 NBA Draft who was the head coach at Wake Forest at the time, came to a Bonner-Pendergrast practice to watch Ingraham after recruiting him from afar and eventually swayed Ingraham to pick the Demon Deacons after an official visit.

Manning was there on that fateful morning as Ingraham was backpedaling - just as he had done countless times before - when something went wrong.

“I tried to take off,” remembered Ingraham. “And I snapped my left Achilles. It took a year to get back, but I’m good. I’m fine now.”

More than five years after he injured his Achilles, Ingraham is a graduate student playing closer to home at Rider University and one of the top players in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference. And though that injury might have changed the way his college years played out, he’s not regretful about the path it led him on.

On Friday night at Alumni Gymnasium on the Rider campus, Ingraham recorded his third consecutive double-double with 11 points and 10 rebounds in a physical game that ended in a 72-67 loss to MAAC preseason favorite Quinnipiac University. On Wednesday night, in a 78-75 loss at Fairfield, Ingraham scored a career-high 21 points to go along with 14 rebounds. In the game before that, he had 12 points and 11 rebounds in another close loss against University of Delaware. The individual success is nice, but Ingraham wants team success more than anything.

“It’s got to translate,” Ingraham said after the Broncs lost their fourth straight game and dropped to 4-6 overall and 0-2 in the MAAC. “We have to get some wins.”

Ingraham is doing his part. He is averaging 10.9 points and a team-best 6.9 rebounds per game. He is a physical player, and Friday night was just another night in the MAAC for Ingraham. At different times during the game, he hurt his knee and hurt his ankle and also had to come out of the game to have a bloody hand cleaned up.

“I’m used to it,” said Ingraham, whose politeness and soft-spokenness off the court belie his toughness on it. “I’m very used to it. There are going to be nicks and bruises. You have to play through them.”

At first, when he was injured during that preseason practice his freshman year at Wake Forest, he thought it was nothing significant - just another nick or bruise. He had never had a serious injury before.

“I’m thinking this is a regular ankle injury - I didn’t know I tore my Achilles,” Ingraham said. “Then after it happened they all crowded around me. I’m sitting on a chair, and coach Manning starts praying for me, and I’m like, ‘Is it that serious?’ They told me I tore my Achilles, and it would be like a year recovery.”

Ingraham added that his teammates, coaches and family helped during the recovery: “It was tough, but they were there for emotional support. I was down, but they didn’t let me get too down.”

During the year of recovery, Manning and the coaching staff who recruited Ingraham were replaced by current Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes and his people. 

“I knew I wasn’t Forbes’ guy - no diss to him or anything, but I understood he had players coming in,” Ingraham said. “I understood that.”

Ingraham’s hard work to rehabilitate his injured Achilles paid off. He was ready to play in the 2020-2021 season opener against Delaware State. In that game, in his collegiate debut, Ingraham scored a game-high 19 points and was 7-of-7 from the field and 5-of-5 from the foul line to become one of just three freshmen in Wake Forest history to have a perfect field goal percentage with at least seven attempts in a game and the first to do so in more than 40 years.

“That was fun,” Ingraham said. “Everything went well for me that game.” 

Ingraham would play one more game that season and sit out the rest of it for medical reasons. The next season, 2021-22, his third at Wake Forest, he played in one game before deciding to transfer closer to home to Rider.

“Things didn’t work out as planned,” he said. “That’s life. Things here are going to happen. You just have to get through it.”

Ingraham was familiar with Rider. His high school teammate, Ajiri Ogemuno-Johnson, was playing for the Broncs, and he had met their head coach, Kevin Baggett, during the recruiting process. Ingraham said the presence of Ogemuno-Johnson was one of the reasons he picked Rider, as was Baggett.

“I wanted to go somewhere the head coach wanted me,” he said. “That’s why I came here.”

He was closer to home and his parents, Tynetta and Roger, who both played basketball at Seton Hall and met while students there, and he enjoyed being at Rider.

Ingraham sat out the rest of the 2021-22 season with the Broncs. In 2022-23, his first suiting up for Rider, he played in all 30 games, starting more than half, and then last season he started all 32 games for the Broncs.

Ingraham is one of several Rider players with Philadelphia-area connections. On Friday night, when the Broncs were making a second-half comeback that eventually fell short, Ingraham was one of three local players leading the way.

Flash Burton, a 6-foot-3 freshman point guard from Cardinal O’Hara, made his first career start for Rider and finished with 10 points and made two foul shots to tie the game at 65 with 1:47 left. 

“Flash is still a freshman,” said Baggett, a 1989 St. Joseph’s graduate now in his 13th season as the Rider head coach. “He’s still trying to figure some things out. We trust in Flash. He’s just got to grow up and stop making the mistakes, but we trust in Flash. He’s stepped up and made some big free throws already in our first 10 games.”

Another player from Philadelphia on the Rider roster is Ife West-Ingram. The 6-foot-7 sophomore forward from Abington Friends came off the bench for the Broncs and had all 8 of his points in the second half and was involved in a key and controversial play when the referees originally called goaltending on one of his shots that would have tied the game at 67 with 59.0 seconds left only to overturn it on replay.

Ingraham is proud of his Philadelphia basketball roots and has fond memories of his time at Bonner-Prendergast when he played with future NBA player Isaiah Wong and played in some memorable games against Imhotep Charter.

“I miss it,” he said. “I love Bonner. I have to go back and visit.”

Ingraham has enjoyed his time at Rider. He has one year of eligibility remaining but hasn’t made a decision how he will spend it.

“It’s up in the air right now,” he said.

Ingraham has more immediate concerns. He wants to help his team secure a good spot in the MAAC tournament - hopefully secure a first-round bye he said - and then win it to earn a spot in the NCAA tournament.

“I’ve never had that March Madness experience,” he said.

He originally thought that his March Madness experience would come with Wake Forest. But then fate stepped in, and that ordinary preseason practice so many years ago turned into anything but ordinary and ultimately helped lead him to Rider.

“Coach Kevin has treated me well,” Ingraham said. “I appreciate being here.”