City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Ray Jerome committed to the first school to offer him, though not to the first coach.

The Cheshire Academy (Conn.) senior gave a verbal commitment to Penn head coach Steve Donahue on Saturday, close to a year after he was offered by former Quakers coach Jerome Allen.

A regime change in March didn’t do much to change Penn’s staff’s pursuit of the 6-foot-3, 180-pound shooting guard.

“Donahue probably called me a month and a half after he got the job,” Jerome said. “He said ‘I know we offered you with the old staff, I’m going to honor the offer and I want to come see how you play,’ and after that he liked how I played a lot.”

Quite a few other schools offered Jerome during the spring and summer, including Fordham, Holy Cross, Quinnipiac and Bucknell.

Ultimately, though, nothing compared to the first school to say they wanted him.

“The Ivy league education and degree coming out from a school like Penn is so significant in the world, whether you’re in business or engineering, design, you can get a job opportunity really quickly out of college,” he said. “And what Coach Donahue has done in the past, I really believe in him and his system...Penn’s going to be a force not only in the Ivy league but in Pennsylvania and the Northeast, so that’s why.”

A native of Albany, N.Y., Jerome transferred from Albany Academy to Cheshire Academy last summer, repeating his junior year and moving from the class of 2015 to 2016.

He’s the fourth member of Penn’s 2016 recruiting class, joining Northfield Mt. Hermon (Mass.) forward A.J. Brodeur and a pair of local guards, Germantown Academy’s Devon Goodman and Downingtown West’s Ryan Betley.

He and Betley are both shooting guards with good size for the perimeter, and both are very capable 3-point shooters; Betley has a little more size at 6-5 and can score from wherever, while Jerome is a more physical presence around the perimeter.

“I try to be very aggressive, whether it’s from the 3-point line or going at the rim, and on defense I can guard multiple positions,” he said. “If Coach Donahue needs me to guard the point guard, I’ll be all up on him, and if he wants me to guard their small forward, I’ll go for it because there’s nothing to lose on defense as long as you let it all out there.”

This summer, Jerome played with the N.Y. Jayhawks on the Under Armour Association, though he found it tough to get minutes and shots on a team that also included high-major wing Hamidou Diallo. He did get an opportunity to play for the Puerto Rican U-20 national team as part of a showcase against Louisville's 2015-16 squad on the island in August.

"It was a great experience, just playing with guys and seeing Damion Lee up front," he said, referencing the former Drexel wing who's playing out his final year of eligibility as a Cardinal with NBA hopes on the line. "He’s a great player, so just putting myself in the level of competition like that was good.”

Though Jerome said he’s planning on enrolling in Wharton, Penn’s famed undergraduate business school, he also has a passion for computers and electronics, and is considering doing something involving technical management.

But he loves taking machines apart and putting them together.

“I helped my friend put together his computer and it was a gaming PC,” he said, “So that whole thing probably cost $4000 and I just put it together for him.”