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Hartford gets commitment from Carroll guard Ryan Daly

08/07/2015, 2:15pm EDT

By Josh Verlin

Archbishop Carroll's Ryan Daly (above) is headed to Hartford next fall. (Photo: Josh Verlin)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin) &
Aron Minkoff (@AronMinkoff)
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Hartford head coach John Gallagher owes sophomore walk-on Mark Plousis some credit with a recruiting assist.

Archbishop Carroll senior guard Ryan Daly called Plousis--a Cardinal O’Hara grad with whom he attended grade school at St. Denis in Haverford--on Thursday night to ask him about the school.

All he got was positive information.

“He loves coach Gallagher, he loves the school, he thinks the program is on the rise, he basically just told me everything that I wanted to hear,” Daly said.

So the 6-foot-4 shooting guard with a scorer’s touch called up Gallagher and committed.

And he admitted that the phone call with Plousis certainly helped sealed the deal.

“It really helped, I didn’t know any other student really up there already,” Daly said. “He really did help a lot, just hearing from him, because he’s been through the school and he’s been through the program already for a year.”

Gallagher originally offered Daly back in April after seeing him on the AAU circuit with the Jersey Shore Warriors, becoming one of two schools to offer a scholarship along with St. Francis (Pa.); Ivy League schools Brown and Penn, who can’t offer scholarships, offered him spots on their rosters.

While on a barnstorming tour of the Northeast in June, seeing six schools in four days with his brother Colin and father, former Penn State assistant coach Brian Daly, it was Hartford that stood out the most.

“Coach Gallagher is very passionate, he has a feeling and I have a feeling that that program’s going to take off soon,” Daly said. “There’s something about them, they just got a new locker room, you can tell they’re getting ready to start something big up there.”

Gallagher, who has been at Hartford for five seasons, has accumulated a 68-88 record, including a 41-39 record in the American East Conference. Most recently, the Hawks went 14-16 with a 10-6 record in their conference.

They have never been to the NCAA tournament since becoming a Division I program in 1984-95.

Daly joins a roster that has several players with ties to Philadelphia already. Former Roman Catholic big man TreVaughn Wilkerson will be a freshman there this year, as well as Plousis and Irish sophomore forward John Carroll who played for The Hill School as a post-grad in 2013-14.

As a junior at Carroll, Daly averaged 12.8 ppg under head coach Paul Romanczuk, and was a key cog on a Patriots team that came up just short in the AAA state championship game against PCL-rival Neumann-Goretti.

By Daly’s side through the whole process has been his father, Brian Daly, a former head coach at Bonner who later was an assistant under Pat Chambers at both Boston University and Penn State.

Daly left his post at State College this spring to spend more time with his family.

“Before, we used to see each other maybe once every two weeks,” Daly said. “But him being here every day, it’s been great, I’ve learned a lot basketball-wise, and this recruiting process...he’s really informed on it, he really helped me out. We sorted through our options and we agreed that Hartford was the place for me to commit.”

Daly attending State College High School as a freshman before moving to the Philadelphia suburbs to be closer to family.

With his dad remaining at State College for his basketball career, the younger Daly, Ryan, moved back to the Philadelphia area to help pursue his basketball career. While that may have not been the sole reason, attending a program like Carroll has certainly helped him immensely.

"I didn’t know if I could play Division I at the time...luckily I grew a little bit and coach Paul and coach Tony Sagona from AAU have just gotten me so much better," he said. "After sophomore year, I probably thought ‘okay, maybe this could actually happen, you could be a Division I player.'"

Now, there's no doubt.