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Temple Team Camp: Day 1 Notebook (June 26)

06/27/2015, 12:30am EDT

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Temple’s practice facility in Pearson-McGonigle Hall was buzzing on Friday night, as the Owls’ high school team camp opened up with four sets of action taking place on six courts throughout the building.

Some of Philly’s top high school programs took the court with quite a few other area teams, joined by some schools from New York, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland.

Here’s a notebook from the night’s action, focusing on a number of players (and others) who made their first appearances in some new places:

Cassidy makes debut as Cherokee coach
Just a day after introducing himself to his new team, Eric Cassidy got the chance to coach Cherokee in live game action.

And his debut was a successful one, with the former Schalick head coach guiding the Chiefs to a win over Pennsauken (N.J.) despite only having a two-hour open gym workout on Thursday to get any sort of coaching done.

“They’re smart kids, so I just put a little bit of something in yesterday, a couple of offensive sets,” Cassidy said. “I told them ‘you’re lucky that I’ve only known you for 48 hours, because there’s some stuff we need to work on,’ but overall I was very impressed.”

Despite leading Schalick (N.J.) to the last two South Jersey Group 1 title games, Cassidy left the school that had been his only head coaching job due to the ability to be both a coach and teacher at Cherokee; he’ll be teaching 11th and 12th grade health and physical education. Previously, he had been teaching at Bridgeton HS while coaching at Schalick.

“I wanted to teach in the building where I coach, and Cherokee provided me that opportunity,” he said.

It’s been a long two months for the boys on Cherokee’s basketball team, after former head coach Matt Shultz stepped down on April 15 in order to spend more time with his family. It looked in mid-May like the program would be under the leadership of Paul Weideman, but the former Haddonfield head coach only lasted eight days at Cherokee before deciding that ultimately he wanted to stay at the school he’d taken to the last two South Jersey Group 2 title games.

So it took until the last 10 days of June before a senior-laden Cherokee squad found out who would be guiding them next year. They’re happy both to have a coach and to have it be Cassidy, who won over 100 games in his six years at Schalick.

“He really knows what he’s doing,” said senior guard Kevin Brown, one of a few returners from a team that went 19-10 and made it all the way to the South Jersey Group IV championship game. “It’s really different from last year, but it’s a good kind of different.

“It’s better than sitting here wondering who’s going to be our coach and it being too late and by the time we get a coach we have to try to put things in too quick,” Brown added. “We know who our guy is, we’re happy with him, and now we can just go.”

Cherokee will certainly “go” quite a bit more under Cassidy, who’s going to install more of an uptempo system than Schultz utilized in his five years at the school.

The Chiefs were pressing and running quite a bit in the win over Pennsauken, and though there were a few missed assignments here and there, a group of seniors that includes Brown, Marcus Marshall and Grant Gibson should adjust to the new style before too long.

“I thought it was definitely a lot more uptempo than it was under coach Schultz,” Gibson said. “We’re still playing good defense, so it’s fun.”

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Roman Catholic welcomes Stevens to lineup
[UPDATE, 6/27, 1:30 PM: Stevens cannot take a visit on July 1, per NCAA rules. He will reschedule his visit to Pittsburgh.]
A few months after announcing his intentions to transfer to Catholic League powerhouse Roman Catholic for his senior season, Lamar Stevens finally made his debut in the Cahillite blue and gold.

And though his best friend and former Abington Friends teammate Tony Carr was sidelined with a hip injury (more on that below), Stevens (pictured above) had no trouble fitting into the Roman lineup, bringing his powerful, attacking style to the court in wins over Friends’ School (Md.) and Plymouth Whitemarsh.

“It was fun, something new,” he said after the P-W win. “I’m just excited to get into school, improve my academics and just stay focused. It was good, though.”

Carr and Stevens went their separate ways after that freshman year at Abington Friends in 2012-13, with Carr going directly to Roman--helping the Cahillites to a 2015 Catholic League and PIAA Class AAAA championship--while Stevens went to join incoming Temple freshman Levan Alston, Jr. at The Haverford School.

Now they’re reuniting on the high school level, but they’ve also played the last two summers together on the AAU circuit with Team Final. Also in the Team Final program are two other rising seniors, Penn State commit Nazeer Bostick and forward Paul Newman, plus rising junior D’Andre Vilmar.

All five will be playing Division I hoops, with Stevens and Carr each holding over 20 high-major offers apiece.

“We’re all pretty good friends,” Stevens said. “I have a lot of friends at Roman, so I’m excited to get there and get to work right away.”

The next big thing for the whole gang are the Nike EYBL finals, the Peach Jam, on July 8-12 in N. Augusta, South Carolina; after that and two more live period weekends, Stevens and the rest of the class of 2016 around the nation will start focusing on their college decisions.

Stevens has a planned unofficial visit to Pitt on July 1, where he’ll see one of the number of ACC schools who have extended scholarships. While he hasn’t planned any of his official visits yet, he did say there were two schools likely to get a visit--Indiana and Penn State.

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McCall considering transfer, reclassification
One final familiar face in a new place was Jabri McCall, who suited up for Academy New Church for Friday night.

The 6-foot-tall guard, who’s spent the last two years at Martin Luther King HS under head coach Sean Colson, said that it’s “still up for debate” whether or not he’ll be leaving or staying at his old school for the 2015-16 season, but added that “most likely” he would be heading to the Friends’ school and repeating his junior year.

McCall was a valuable part of King’s lineup the last two years, and would have been potentially its leading scorer as a senior as the Cougars look to make another deep run in the PIAA Class AAAA playoffs. But it’s not the basketball end that necessitated the move.

“It was mostly about the education piece, for college, preparing me for college,” he said.

At Academy New Church, McCall will have to provide some leadership right away for a still-mostly-young group of Lions that will feature no fewer than two rising sophomores and two rising juniors in their starting lineup this fall.

If McCall does wind up there and moves into the Class of 2017, he gives ANC a very talented quartet for the next two years, along with rising sophomores Marcus Little and Matthue Cotton plus rising junior forward Markus Stevenson.

“Most of them are young, most of us are juniors, so they’re more inexperienced,” he said. “Most of them have played (only) one or two years of varsity basketball, so I’m looking to fill a leadership role.”

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Quick Hits
--Team Final had a good EYBL regular season, going 11-6 to qualify for the Peach Jam. But their road to a championship hit a major bump, with Tony Carr suffering a hip flexor injury during a summer league game on June 22 that had the high-major point guard on crutches at Temple. He’ll be seeing a specialist this upcoming Monday, June 29, which should help him figure out if he’ll be able to get back in time to get out in front of Division I coaches in the first of three July live periods. Last year, Carr led Team Final’s 16s to the Peach Jam title game, where they fell just short of the championship; you can bet he would give anything to get a chance to make up for that in his final month of AAU ball.

--Enjoyed watching a solid battle down low between the frontcourts of Academy New Church and Abington HS. ANC has 6-8 rising sophomore Marcus Little, who has a chance to be a high-major talent with his strong frame, good motor and offensive ability; Abington countered with 6-7 rising junior Joe O’Brien and 6-6 incoming freshman Eric Dixon, and the two held their own against one of the top young posts around. O’Brien has a strong frame throughout and bodied up well on defense while Dixon, a lefty, moves well despite carrying a few extra pounds. The two gave Little all he could handle--though ANC came away with a 57-52 win.

--Springside Chestnut Hill has one of the area’s best-kept secrets, rising sophomore guard Justin Anderson. The 6-2 guard can really score the basketball, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s left-handed but can go right, which makes him rather well-rounded and dangerous for the 2018 class. Anderson has a number of ways to attack the basket, utilizing a floater and a good jump-stop to work himself free around the bucket while needing no second thoughts about launching up a 3-pointer whenever he has some daylight. It’s only a matter of time before people start paying attention if he continues to improve and work at his game.

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Photo credit: Josh Verlin/City of Basketball Love