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TBT: Mostly Sports team brings Philly ties to West Coast

06/16/2015, 10:15am EDT

By Aron Minkoff

Aron Minkoff (@AronMinkoff)
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The roots of one of 97 teams competing in next month’s The Basketball Tournament can be traced back to a small house in Glenolden, Pa.

That is where a trio of Philadelphia basketball products purchased a home together at 200 East Glenolden Avenue, a few blocks past the southwest boundary of the city limits, just a short walk from the Philadelphia Airport.

“Well, the house itself was tragic,” said Brian Jesiolowski, who played at Saint Joseph’s until 2004. “I wouldn't recommend buying a house to anyone unless they are about to start a family and don't want to live in Delaware County. However, living with those two guys was awesome.”

Those two guys were T.J. Mann and Jeff Miller, who played their college basketball at Kutztown University and University of the Sciences, respectively, in the early 2000s. The three are part of a heavily Philly-flavored Mostly Sports squad that is participating in this year’s version of The Basketball Tournament.

“You leave college and you think you might never live with your friends again but we did it for years...along with a lot of random roommates,” Jesiolowski continued. “It wasn't far from a halfway house at times. High comedy in that place, a lot of great memories.”

The three, through being roommates and best friends, played in various three-on-three basketball tournaments together, which really helped improve their bond.

“If we did not have that chemistry from living together, I think it took us to a new level,” Mann said. “Spending those entire days together, playing basketball, creating memories and laughing about it and stuff. From there on out, we kind of got hooked and played in every single tournament and league, anything that popped up we tried to make sure that we stuck together.”

So it was an obvious decision to sign up to compete in the second edition of The Basketball Tournament (TBT), which made a splash last year with a talented field and a whopping $500,000 check to the victors.

This year, it’s expanded to a 97-team tournament, with four regions throughout the United States and many former college stars on the rosters. Also, the prize is doubled, as the teams are competing for a million dollars and the chance to play in the Final Four on ESPN.

Still, it seems odd that a team with a heavy Philadelphia flavor would play in a region that hosts its games in Los Angeles.

That’s thanks to Jesiolowski, who has left Philly for L.A. to further pursue his acting career.

His most widely-seen performance to date, according to his IMDB page, was in the 2006 Matthew McConaghy film “Failure to Launch,” where he played, appropriately, Basketball Player No. 2.

After spending three and a half years in Mississippi, Mann is also moving to the West Coast, where he will join Jesiolowski in L.A. along with a majority of the rest of the Mostly Sports gang.

So the reunion is taking place on the far side of the country.

The team will feature another pair of teammates, Jay Devlin and Raymond Strickland, who played with Mann, Jesiolowski and Miller in the annual Delco Pro-Am summer league.

Strickland played his college ball at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa. and Mann described him as the “fourth roommate,” even though he never physically lived with the trio.

It was Devlin, who hosts a sports talk podcast in L.A. called Mostly Sports, who gave birth to the team’s name.

“We’ve all played together in various leagues since we got out of college, so we are really familiar with each other,” said Mann, who also serves as the team’s general manager. “Our strength is in our chemistry more than in our individual talent, I mean, not to say that at one point in our careers or our basketball lives, we weren’t talented players, but definitely as we are getting older, the more important thing is chemistry and knowing how to play.”

This will be their second year in the tournament, and while they didn’t fare so well last year, they chalk that up to a lack of chemistry. Jesiolowski, who missed last year’s festivities while recovering from tearing his ACL, MCL and meniscus in the 2014 Delco Pro-Am, is back and healthy.

“[Last year] we looked at it and we looked at a lot of the talent that was getting involved, and we decided to go out of our core group of guys that we were used to playing with and try to get a couple of 6-10, 6-11 guys and put some youth on the team,” Mann said. “We had a great team, individual talent wise, we had a lot of guys that could really play, but I think what happened was, we didn’t have much chemistry at all and we were just out there, running around, always searching for what would work, instead of knowing what works.”

Mostly Sports will have their work cut out for them as they face quite a deep talent pool within the tournament, but while it may surprise people, they certainly won’t surprise themselves if they win a few games.

“We know the tournament is loaded, we just want to go in there and play hard, represent the Philadelphia area, Delaware county, the Delco Pro-Am,” Mann said. “Thats a league near and dear to my heart since I was 16 years old.

“We know that we are not the biggest names from Philadelphia in the tournament, the most notable at all, but we are gonna play as hard as anybody from our area that is in the tournament.”