City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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From his Philadelphia roots through a Schuylkill County upbringing and now to the Lehigh Valley, Marquis Ratcliff’s basketball journey has taken him all over the state. 

Now, as a senior at Moravian University, he’s able to reflect back on how he went from a kid who wasn’t sure he was going to play college basketball until his senior year of high school to putting together one of the most dominant careers in Greyhounds history. And with his future in hoops uncertain beyond this year, Ratcliff’s living by a simple motto at the moment.

“Ball is life, that’s really it,” he told CoBL. “I want to surround myself by as much basketball as I can and hopefully take this team as far as I can.”

Ratcliff grew up in North Philadelphia, off Rising Sun Ave., but his family moved to Pottsville when he was in middle school. He enrolled at Nativity BVM for high school, starting off his high school career as a 6-foot-3 forward on the junior varsity squad. 

By midway through his freshman year, he was swinging varsity, and his trajectory went upwards from there. His junior year, by which point he was a physical 6-5, he was a major piece of Nativity’s first-ever PIAA state championship squad, beating Berlin-Brothersvalley in the 2021 Class 1A title game. 

It wasn’t until his senior year, when several area Division III schools got in contact, that he decided to keep playing at the next level. His decision came down to Moravian, located in Bethlehem, and Elizabethtown College, located between Harrisburg and Lancaster. He settled on Moravian, which at the time was under the direction of head coach Darryl Keckler. 

Expectations for Ratcliff weren’t sky-high initially. He came off the bench in his first two games of his career, but his production — 13 points against Muhlenberg in his debut, then 19 points and nine rebounds against PSU-Brandywine in his second — was undeniable. Keckler moved him into the starting lineup, and he hasn’t left since. 

“As the season progressed, he just kept making strides and it was a no-brainer at that point,” said Moravian interim head coach Michael Mayes, who was a first-year assistant at the time and took over for Keckler this fall. “I want to say by the third game, we thought like yeah, he might be good. We didn’t know he was stud material until his second year.”

Ratcliff’s Moravian career has less been a study of growth over the years and more an example of domination from the get-go. As a freshman in 2022-23, he led the Greyhounds in scoring (17.5 ppg) and rebounding (8.6 ppg) as well as blocks (51) and steals (23). He repeated that feat in all but steals as a sophomore, averaging 20.6 ppg and 9.7 rpg, then put up 18.9 ppg and 8.1 rpg as a junior as Moravian had a winning record (16-10, 11-7 Landmark) for the first time in his college career. 

Now standing 6-foot-7 with a chiseled physique at 200 pounds, Ratcliff immediately stands out at the Division III level with his size and physicality. 

In the first two games of the 2025-26 campaign, he’s putting up dominant numbers. Ratcliffe opened his senior season with a 35-point, 12-rebound, three-assist effort in a double-overtime win over Muhlenberg on Saturday; he followed that up with a 41-point, 12-rebound, six-assist outing in another double-overtime win, 120-118 over Immaculata. It was the program’s first 40-point game in 53 seasons. 

Ratliffe’s game is built around scoring at the rim and getting good looks in transition, but he’s also a career 33% 3-point shooter, able to punish teams who leave him open at the perimeter and let him shoot. He’s also got a propensity for getting to the line and has increased his free-throw percentage each season, from 61.4% as a freshman to 76.3% as a junior and 78.6% early in his senior year.

The Greyhounds’ victory over the Mighty Macs on Thursday night was a wildly entertaining, up-and-down affair that saw the visitors open up multiple double-digit leads only to see the hosts close the gap each time. 

It wasn’t until Central Bucks East grad Liam Cummiskey’s transition layup with less than two seconds left in double overtime that Moravian finally escaped with a win. It’s not the kind of game the Greyhounds would have pulled out during Ratcliff’s freshman or sophomore years, especially after he fouled out midway through the first overtime. 

“Yeah, those are definitely games that we didn’t pull out the last couple years,” Ratcliff said. “The fact that we’ve been in two games back-to-back like that and won both of them, trailed and came back, these guys are relentless.”

Even with most of his senior year left to play, Ratcliff is all over the Moravian record book. His 1,462 career points as 8th in program history; he’s almost a lock to pass O’Neil Holder for third (1,660), while the program record of 1,891 (Brandon Zaleski, 2001-05) is within reach with a big year. He’s inside the top 10 in all sorts of offensive categories, as well as total rebounds (667, 9th) where he’ll make a run at the all-time leader (Tom Fore, 871).

“The kid is extremely humble, so his first three years, we spoke about it and he kinda just put it in his back pocket,” Mayes said. “That was never his main focus, he just played. Now it’s stuff that we talk about, I talk to him about it, you have potential to do this, potential to be the all-time leading scorer and win some games and do something at Moravian that hasn’t been done in a while.”

Of course, it would help Ratcliff’s pursuit of the top spots if the Greyhounds could extend their season past the season finale Feb. 21 at Juniata. And that’s top of mind for both player and team, which hasn’t seen a conference championship and NCAA Tournament appearance since 2018. 

“To win a college championship would be nice, that’s what I’ve been chasing since I’ve been playing,” he said. “It would be nice to have a high school championship and a college championship.”

Whether Ratcliff’s career continues beyond this season is still up in the air. A finance major, Ratcliff is debating whether he wants to enter the business world or give it a run as a professional basketball player. Even top D-III players usually start at a lower-level foreign league, needing to prove themselves overseas to move up through the ranks. 

“That’s to be continued,” he said.