City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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PHILADELPHIA — Jimmy Dillon and Sarah Monaghan know what they are up against. Dillon, 46, will be taking over the Archbishop Ryan girls’ basketball program and Monaghan, 29, will be taking over the Bonner-Prendergast girls’ program.

They both have long, layered Philadelphia-area basketball roots. Dillon is from the Northeast section of Philadelphia, is a Holy Ghost Prep and Notre Dame graduate, where he played for the legendary Tony Chapman in high school, and the late John MacLeod at Notre Dame. Monaghan is the daughter of former Bonner and Penn State football great Ed Monaghan and played under the legendary Tom Stewart at Bonner-Prendie.

They both know the area. They both know the coaches. And they both know the gauntlet they are stepping into—the Philadelphia Catholic League, considered the best girls’ basketball league in the state, which had more teams in the PIAA state championship (three, Neumann-Goretti, Lansdale Catholic and Archbishop Wood) than other any league.

Dillon, a 1996 Holy Ghost Prep graduate, inherits a team that under previous coach Tom Dillard went 3-18 overall and 2-9 in the rugged Catholic League. He was named Ryan girls’ head coach in March. Monaghan, a 2014 Bonner-Prendie grad, will be taking over a middling team that went 11-9 overall and 4-7 in the Catholic League. She was an assistant coach under Stewart for the last 10 years and will be coaching with her sisters, Alyssa, a star at St. Joe’s, and Emily, a 2018 Bonner & Prendie. She was named Pandas’ head coach in April.

Bonner-Prendie reached consecutive PIAA Class 4A state semifinals in 2018 and 2019, winning the District 12 Class 4A title both years and losing to the eventual state champion in those seasons. The Pandas, however, have not been back to the state playoffs in six years. Last year was their first winning season since going 19-10 in 2018-19.

Monaghan will have something to work with in returning Mara George, who missed her sophomore year with a torn ACL injured in last year’s first scrimmage, in 5-4 freshman point guard Kayla Epps, 5-8 freshman forward Skylar Rothley, and 5-3 freshman guard London Tyler, who received significant minutes.  

“We’re going to work around them,” said Monaghan, who will also have Amber Ballinger, a Bonner-Prendie grad who went on to play at Immaculata, as an assistant coach and who will be the head coach of the junior varsity. “We’ve been working out. We have girls who play multiple sports, and we have not met as a full group yet. We are a 4A and I would like to go up to Class 5A next season. Right now, we’re a Class 4A. My goal is for us to be a defensively sound team. We’ll work from our defense and get out and run. We’ll be an uptempo team that will be a pressure-defensive team.

“We’re working on conditioning now. I’ve been lucky enough to work under Tom Stewart for 10 years and learned a lot from him. I was the junior varsity coach for two seasons, so I have some head coaching experience. But I have surrounded myself with my sisters, who have a lot of knowledge, and Amber has great knowledge and experience playing at Immaculata. My sister Alyssa and Amber’s senior year was the first time Bonner-Prendie went to the states in school history in 2015. They know winning. We have a staff who care about this program. The goal is to find kids who want to come here and are interested in playing. We can win here. We want to make this the kind of program where kids want to play here again.”      

Dillon has some work to do. For the last 20 years he has run the Hoops 24-7 Basketball Academy. He will be the fourth coach in three years of the Ragdolls, who two years ago were coached by Jullian Rattliff, who was removed before his second year in November 2023, when assistant Mike Gallagher stepped in as the interim coach, who was followed by Dillard last season.

Dillon’s daughter Reese is a 5-foot-6 sophomore at Ryan, and younger daughter Aubrey, who is 5-8, will be entering her freshman year at Ryan in September. The Ragdolls have had consecutive seasons in which they finished 2-9 in the Catholic League and have won a combined seven Catholic League games in the last three years.

This will be Dillon’s second stint as a head coach. He coached Nazareth Academy during the 2016-17 season.

“Through my basketball academy, I have worked with kids from all over the area,” Dillon said. “My youngest daughter is in eighth grade now and I have had her and six other girls who have played for me on an ICBA team, out of the Bustleton Bengals Organization, for the last five, six years. We won the ICBA League all five years. These girls have been highly successful. In CYO Region I with Our Lady of Calvary, we won four consecutive championships. So many of these girls are like adopted daughters of mine. When the time came for going to high school, all these girls wanted to do was play together.

“Ryan was a good opportunity. I had to run it by Reese and Aubrey to coach there. We couldn’t get all the girls to come to Ryan. My job is to build a program and change a culture. These girls know what I am about. We should be able to create decent culture. It’s just a matter of how long. We have been talking about ways to get some buzz going. The Northeast has great talent. We want to make Ryan a place where girls want to come and play basketball. I know how tough the Philadelphia Catholic League is. I know they have great coaches like (Neumann-Goretti) Coach Petey (Andrea Peterson). My messaging is I want to understand what works and what doesn’t. I want Ryan girls’ basketball to trend in the right direction.

“The biggest compliment that I am looking for this year is to get in postgame handshake lines and people turning around and saying, ‘Wow, your girls played hard. We can see a difference.’ With being as young as we will be, I want to get a buzz going. I want to run and make this fun. I joke with people that we may score 50, 60 points a game in the Catholic League this year. The only problem is we may give up 80 or 90 (laughs).”    

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.