City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin) &
Thomas Primosch (@ThomasPrimosch)
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When La Salle College HS opened up a quick 11-4 lead against Father Judge, head coach Joe Dempsey had to have been pleased with his team’s quick start.

“Absolutely,” he said afterwards. “This is the Catholic League, and it’s on the road.”

Dempsey’s team had largely been starting games off poorly this season, forcing themselves to play from behind for the majority of the game.

However, this time the Explorers were able to jump out in front and dictate the pace of the game from start to finish, pulling out a 56-47 win at Judge.

La Salle (10-1, 2-0 PCL) only trailed once the entire game and the Explorers shot well from both the field (19-of-36, 52.7 percent) and the free-throw line (13-of-15, 86.6 percent).

After trailing by as many as eight early on and cutting it to four at the half,  Father Judge (7-3, 0-2) made a push to begin the fourth quarter and they took the lead for a brief second, thanks in part to the play of guards Marc Rodriguez, who finished with 17 points, and Matt O’Connor.

Rodriguez, a 6-1 junior, scored the final five points of the third quarter to bring Father Judge within 38-35 after the Crusaders had trailed by as many as eight.

That momentum continued into the fourth as O’Connor, a 5-9 junior, had two 3-point plays on driving layups on back-to-back possessions to give Judge its only lead, 42-41 with 5:20 remaining in the ballgame.

“He had a coming out party in the Hatboro-Horsham game, he had 10 (points),” Judge coach Sean Tait said, referencing a Dec. 29 win that saw Rodriguez miss overtime with an injury and O’Connor step up in a big way. “He’s not a rookie anymore, after tonight.”

La Salle guard Jarrod Stukes quickly put a stop to Judge’s momentum, however, and the Explorers went on a 9-2 run with Stukes leading the charge.

The younger brother of former Explorer standout Amar Stukes, who graduated in 2013 and is now in his redshirt sophomore season at La Salle University, Jarrod took another step forward in his emergence as a more-than-capable lead guard in the Catholic League, providing 16 of his 20 points in the second half to help his team hang on to the win.

“I was just playing along and I was getting off shots,” he said. “I felt good attacking the basket so I just kept going.”

While Amar, who's around 6-3, was able to use his size to his advantage at the high school level to get to the rim, Jarrod is only about 5-10 and relies on his quickness and body control to burst to the hole and score on a variety of scoops, floaters and bank shots.

Next year will be the seventh in a row that Dempsey will have a Stukes under his watch, and it's clearly an experience he'll be missing once the youngest of the three brothers--the oldest, Nadir, played at Engineering & Sciences and then Rosemont College, where he graduated from in 2015--moves on to the next level.

“You’re not gonna meet better kids, you’re not gonna meet better family," Dempsey said. "Mom is terrific, dad is terrific and the kids are tough, they’re coachable, they’ve got no egos, they’re team players, and I think we’re lucky to have this guy."

Last year, Stukes got solid varsity reserve minutes behind then-senior guards and current Division II players Shawn Witherspoon (Nyack) and Najee Walls (East Stroudsburg), serving primarily as a defensive specialist.

And while he’s still a pest on that end of the floor, getting up in the face of opposing ballhandlers and disrupting the enemy’s offensive flow, he’s becoming more of an offensive force as a junior.

It helps that he’s developing a more-reliable outside shot, which he showed by hitting one (in three attempts) on Monday; though he’s not going to be known as a sharpshooter just yet, it’s an important facet to add to his game so defenders can’t sag off to protect from his quick first step.

“Coach (Dempsey) always tells me in practice to have confidence in my jumper and a I shoot it better in practice so I just try to bring it to the game,” he said. “I’ve been working on it a lot in practice and coach gives me confidence. He wants me to shoot the ball.”

Joining Stukes in double figures was 6-6 forward and Ursinus commit Shane Stark, who finished with 13 points and 15 rebounds despite being one of a few Explorers players who’ve come down with a winter bug.

“I’m pretty sick right now so I’m not feeling the best,” he admitted, “but it was a good one so of course I’m feeling great at the same time.”

It’s the second close-call loss for Judge to begin league play, after dropping a 49-44 decision at Conwell-Egan in a game the Crusaders led by a point entering the fourth quarter.

As one of about eight teams that are jockeying for Catholic League playoff seedings behind front-runners Neumann-Goretti and Roman Catholic (a group that includes La Salle), Judge can’t afford to lose too many more games against the upper-middle teams in the PCL if it wants to avoid the same fate as last year, where it wound up in a road game at Neumann-Goretti in the league quarterfinals, with predictable results.

“I think we know we belong, we just have to get over the hump and get one of these games,” Tait said. “We’re in them, but we’re falling short. This is a big weekend coming up, Bonner and (Lansdale Catholic), but we’ve got to get both.”