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92 in 92: Harrisburg HS (Pa.)

09/02/2014, 1:30pm EDT

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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It seemed like a near-certainty that Harrisburg would make the state tournament last season, for the who-knows-how-many-ith time under Kirk Smallwood.

As the fifth seed in District 3’s AAAA division, which would send seven teams into the main PIAA draw, Harrisburg needed to win just one game to all but lock up a bid. Led by one of the best backcourts in the state, the Cougars had put together a 17-6 record rolling into the district tournament.

Then they ran into 12-seed Hershey in their first game, and were sent home without even a chance to compete against the top teams in the state. Hershey’s win would be the only upset that first round.

It doesn’t take much imagination to guess how Harrisburg’s players handled their sudden end to a promising season.

“Not well, not well,” Smallwood said on the phone last week. “We thought that we should have progressed and gotten a lot better by the end of the season, but it just didn’t happen for us.”

The Cougars had become PIAA regulars in Smallwood’s 37 years coaching high school basketball; aside from a five-year stint at Central Dauphin East from 1988-93, he’s been at Harrisburg since taking the head coaching job back in 1978. They’ve won the state championship twice, in 1998 and 2002.

To have Harrisburg’s name missing from the 32-team PIAA Class AAAA bracket is something its players have had on their minds all summer.

“Falling short was a season-ruiner,” rising senior guard Jahaad Proctor said. “Harrisburg is known to go to the playoffs, and make the states, and go on runs and win districts and everything.”

It’ll be Proctor who will be tasked with leading the comeback tour. The 6-foot-3 guard, who’s committed to play his college basketball in the Patriot League at the College of the Holy Cross next fall, is just 16 points away from breaking the 1,000-point barrier.

He’s also one of three players on the team–along with freshmen Quintin Flemister and Chris Whittaker–whose dad also played for Smallwood. Proctor’s father, Joe Proctor, who played for Smallwood back in the 80s, is an assistant coach at Harrisburg as well as the head coach of the Team Pennsylvania AAU 17U squad, which featured his son and his Cougar teammate Steve Olson.

“[Joe] was more of a team-oriented guard, he ran the team, that was his first and foremost focus; very good defender,” Smallwood said. “Jahaad is more of a multi-dimensional kind of player, where you can put him in different spots and he can score from a lot of different spots.”

Proctor is going to have a lot of responsibility in the backcourt this year, as the Cougars lost three key guard contributors from last season. In addition to the graduations of Carlos Balkcom (Lock Haven football) and James Ezell (JUCO), they’ll also have to deal with a key defection.

Would-be senior Dejour Williams, who started out at Susquehanna Township (Pa.) along with Proctor as a freshman, is transferring back to his old school for his final year of high school. The point guard duties will have to shift over to Proctor, who will also have to work in several young and inexperienced players around him.

“My senior year I want to win everything. I want to win our conference, states, districts, Mid-Penn–anything that comes with it, I want to win,” Proctor said. “It’s my number one driving force.”

That youth will be an overarching theme for a team that had four freshmen on last year’s roster who will all be counted on to contribute in some form this year. Chris Whittaker, Brennan Jackson, Damien Barber and Quintin Flemister all got some varsity experience last year, but the chemistry is not yet at the level it needs to be if Harrisburg is to return to the state tournament.

“The biggest thing we need to focus on this fall would easily be our teamwork, we need to get together as a team and work,” Olson said. “We have the skill set to succeed, we just don’t play together as a whole yet.”

Up front, Smallwood does have some good size to work with. Olson is joined by Jackson, another 6-8 forward and one of the freshmen who saw time on last year’s squad.

Jackson, who played his AAU ball with Nike-backed Team Final on an extremely talented 15U team this past year, has the body to be a top-level high school forward if he can start to realize his potential.

“I’ve been trying to help him out because he came in and he wasn’t aggressive and I’ve been trying to work with him the past year. He’s gotten a lot better than he was when he first came, you can definitely tell the difference,” Olson said. “His aggressiveness, you can definitely tell the difference; before, he would just try to pull out and shoot 3s and now he actually gets in the post. He’s definitely starting to form into an actual basketball player.”

As he’s likely to see a good rise in minutes, his improvement will be one of the keys to Harrisburg worrying about making it to states–or whether they can make a run at winning them.