City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Don’t let the resumé fool you. Deep down, Matt Griffin has always had Roman Catholic in his blood.

That’s despite spending his high school years at Catholic League rival St. Joseph’s Prep, and then serving as an assistant at the Prep under Speedy Morris the past two seasons.

No, Griffin’s connections to Roman Catholic High School go much deeper than that.

His father, John Griffin, wore the Cahillite uniform until his graduation in 1974, and so both of his sons -- John Jr. and Matt -- grew up hearing stories about Roman games past, meeting former Roman basketball players and cheering for Roman in the Cahillites’ tiny gym at the top of the building at Broad and Vine.

And so Matt Griffin’s hiring as Roman’s newest head basketball coach isn’t a switching of allegiances. It’s four decades of ties to the school paying off at the perfect opportunity.

“I grew up knowing pretty much just about Roman Catholic, and that was my affiliation,” he told CoBL by phone on Wednesday evening, shortly after the school announced his hiring. “I went to all the alumni events that my dad would attend growing up, all the fundraising opportunities were all Roman Catholic...I grew up in a Roman household.”

The shift occurred with the new millennium.

Matt’s older brother by three-and-a-half years, John Jr. was the first of the pair to select his high school. With many of his friends from around their Narberth home choosing to go to Prep, John decided that’s where he would play his high school hoops, enrolling in fall of 2000.

By sheer coincidence, one year later Prep hired William “Speedy” Morris to be its new head coach. Morris, who’d been in charge of the La Salle University team from 1986-2001, also happened to be John Griffin Sr.’s head coach at Roman Catholic back in the 1970s.

“I knew Speedy Morris as my dad’s coach at Roman Catholic,” Matt said. “When my brother went to St. Joe’s Prep and then obviously Speedy got the job at St. Joe’s Prep, I really saw there was no other place for me to go other than to follow in my brother’s footsteps and also to play for Speedy.”

The younger Griffin brother was a three-year varsity player under Morris, serving as team captain as a senior in 2006-07 on a 22-win squad that lost to Roman in the PCL quarterfinals.

He went on to play two seasons at Rider University before finishing out his college career at Boston University under current Penn State head coach Pat Chambers from 2010-12. At both schools, he served as team captain.

“He’s a natural leader and people gravitate to him and I think he’s going to get the most out of our players and develop them into great players and great people,” Roman athletic director Danny DiBerardinis said. “He understands the high-profile basketball program but at the same time it’s a part of a community and he wants to develop kids as people and individuals not just basketball. He got the whole picture.”

Griffin is one of a few young Catholic League coaches who have gotten the job in the last year or so, joining Archbishop Ryan’s Joe Zeglinski and Conwell-Egan’s Eric Kindler as coaches under 30 in the PCL.

But he doesn’t feel that he’s too young to take over one of the biggest programs in the region, and with good reason.

“If you look at the history of the Catholic League and some of the Catholic League coaches now,” he said, “Speedy Morris took the head coaching job at Roman Catholic at age 26...[Archbishop Carroll's] Paul Romanczuk started at the age of 29, Chris McNesby was 31, Carl Arrigale was 33, obviously Joe Zeglinski at 28.

“I think it’s maybe on the lower end of the spectrum for a Catholic League job but it’s right there with the average of some of the great coaches that are coaching today, even, and so that gave me a lot of confidence and I think a lot of that has to do with the experiences that I’ve had up to this age, that has allowed me to feel ready and prepared for this position,” he added.

At Roman, Matt Griffin inherits a squad that’s won the last two Catholic League championships as well as PIAA Class AAAA titles, but has a serious rebuilding process ahead.

Gone are a trio of Penn State freshmen in point guard Tony Carr, Lamar Stevens and Nazeer Bostick. Those three alone combined for 63.7 percent of the Cahillites’ scoring total as seniors; also gone are Brown commit Paul Newman, first doing a prep year at St. Andrew’s (R.I.) as well as talented freshman Mikeal Jones, who transferred to Girard College.

And at a school that expects constant runs in the Catholic League and now state playoff chases, there’s pressure to win almost from the get-go. That’s just one of several challenges the 27-year-old coach will have to deal with right away.

“Everything’s new,” Griffin said. “It’s a new coach, they’ve had a core group of guys that have just graduated, so it’s going to be a newer group of guys playing together. So that’s always a challenge, when you have a newer group and a new coach. That’s number one.

“But when you come off of winning back-to-back state championships and back-to-back Philadelphia Catholic League championships, there is a target on your back and essentially every team gives you their best shot,” he continued. “So I think the challenge for us is to just take it one day at a time, to try to get better every day and that’s what our mindset, is just take it one day at a time, get better every day and not look at we have to win another one. Just that we have to win every day.”

Of course, there’s one additional factor as well -- John Griffin Sr., who still loves his Roman Catholic basketball. And now he has even more reason to cheer as hard as he can.

“He wants to see the program do well and he was excited for me to be the next coach there,” Matt said. “He thought I could do a good job, and I think it’s obviously important to him that I do that.”