City of Basketball Love

Alex Bonner (@abonn610) &
Tom Reifsnyder (@tom_reifsnyder)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of CoBL's "Prepping for Preps," our series of articles previewing area high school teams for the 2015-16 season. For the complete list of schools previewed so far, click here)

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For six years, Roman Catholic had been looking up to Neumann-Goretti on the list of elite basketball teams in Philadelphia.

Last year, playing second fiddle wasn’t quite good enough for the Cahillites. After finishing with an 11-2 record in the Catholic League, they upended the Saints in the PCL championship for their first title since 2007, when Villanova standout and NBA guard Maalik Wayns patrolled Roman’s air-tight gym at the intersection of Broad and Vine.

As a follow-up act, the Cahillites won the District 12 title over Martin Luther King, 58-57, and then put the icing on the cake with a 62-45 win over King, earning them the title of state champions for the first time.

Roman head coach Chris McNesby and his team full of battle-tested seniors will be taking the court this season with a new kind of chip on their shoulder. Although the group is confident in their ability to repeat as champions come March, they’re aware of their new challenge of being the team with a target on its back.

Tony Carr, a 6-foot-4 point guard who was the second-leading scorer in 2014-15, is the team’s leader and says, for him, last season’s championship run was a perfect prelude to the 2015-16 campaign.

“I’ve learned so much from last year and have been approaching this year so much differently,” Carr said. “But winning here and ending Neumann's streak and being on top of everything was just great. It was also what I kind of wanted, just having the target on our back to kind of show everybody that we’re really the champs.”

Roman will return Carr, fellow seniors Nazeer Bostick and Paul Newman and juniors Dakquan Davis and D’Andre Vilmar, all of whom contributed significantly to last year’s historic season.

The team will be without last year’s leading scorer, Gemil Holbrook, and versatile forward Manny Taylor, but the addition of Lamar Stevens, a 6-foot-6 senior transfer from The Haverford School who will be playing for Penn State next fall, will keep Roman’s talent level on par with last season’s group.

“It was different at first, but the community really accepted me as family,” Stevens said of his transition to Roman. “It feels like I’ve been here for way longer than I have been; especially the team, they’ve really been bringing me in with that bond with everybody on the team."

Following his junior season, Stevens announced this spring that he planned on transferring to Roman and joining Carr. The two go way back, playing together from eighth grade through freshman year at Abington Friends School and for the past two summers on Nike-sponsored Team Final.

Stevens noted that Roman has a “more competitive” basketball atmosphere than he experienced in his two seasons at Haverford.

“At Haverford, we had probably four actual basketball players, while the rest are star lacrosse players or baseball players,” Stevens said. “But here we have 10 to 12 strictly basketball players whose main goal is to take it as far as they can go, so it’s a little bit higher level of competition and there’s different motivation, even though we all have a similar goal.”

Stevens is not the only member of the team whose post-grad plans include playing Division I basketball following this season; and he’s not the only one headed to State College either, with Carr and Bostick also committing to Penn State this past year. The trio will join Roman alum Shep Garner, who is currently a sophomore guard for the Nittany Lions.

With a flurry of college signings and recruiting buzz surrounding his players, McNesby wants to make sure they’re focused on seizing the moment throughout the next few months.

“I feel like our mindset needs to be, ‘Be here now,’” McNesby said. “I told them, ‘You guys have Penn State and all these different schools, but you have to be in the moment and absorb everything and just do it one day at a time.’”

Rounding out the starting lineup will be Carr at point, Vilmar and Bostick on the wings, and Stevens manning the paint alongside Newman, a 6-7 forward with a nice touch at the rim and a developing post game. Davis, one of the team’s best catch-and-shoot guards, will reprise his role from last season as McNesby’s first man off the bench.

Early on, it’s likely McNesby will keep a tight shift, giving the majority of minutes to his top six, but two new faces are poised to see their fair share of time on the court this season.

Freshmen Mikeal Jones, a 6-6 wing forward, and Seth Lundy, a 6-4 wing guard, have earned the respect of McNesby for their ability to compete in practice and keep the upperclassmen on their toes.

“We’re really excited about them and they challenge the other guys,” McNesby said of the pair. “[If we have] four to five guys that feel like, ‘Alright, coach. If I’m not on my ‘A’ game, what are you gonna do? Take me out?’ Well, I can, because I have two capable young guys that are very capable of going in and helping us not miss a beat.

“It’s not something you’re threatening your guys with, but, at the same time, they’ll see it at practice and they’re aware that there is competition,” McNesby added. “When there’s competition, there is a sense of urgency, which is what you want.”

With an elite crop of seniors and a talented underclassman group, Roman, ranked No. 8 in MaxPreps’ “Xcellent 25” and No. 13 in the USA TODAY High School Sports’ “Super 25,” will be a popular pick to be nationally ranked all season long; and that’s what worries McNesby the most.

In addition to its always-competitive Catholic League schedule, Roman will match up with national powerhouses Huntington Prep, Montverde Academy and potentially Oak Hill, but McNesby believes his team’s biggest challenge can be revealed by simply looking in the mirror.

“I think our enemy is ourselves,” he said. “If we get too consumed with who we are and people telling us how good we are … I think a lot of teams have faced that, so if we just take it one day at a time, be here now, stay in the present, work hard, be a good teammate, then it will all take care of itself.”

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Correction (12/5/15, 11:25 p.m.): An earlier version of the story contained a particular sentence that may have been interpreted as Lamar Stevens saying he transferred to Roman for a more competitive basketball program, but that is not the case. He simply said Roman has a more competitive basketball atmosphere when asked about the differences between Roman and Haverford, his former school.