City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
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(Ed. Note: This story is part of CoBL’s “Prepping for Preps” series, which will take a look at many of the top high school programs in the region as part of our 2016-17 season preview coverage. The complete list of schools previewed so far can be found here.)

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Players who can average nearly 20 points per game and lead their team's offense en masse both as a junior and as a senior don't come along every day.

Just ask John Harmatuk, who enters the upcoming season tasked with the difficult prospect of replacing such a player.

What makes that challenge even tougher for his Malvern Prep Friars is the lack of experience that has been left behind by Will Powers, the prolific scorer who has began to show his knack for getting buckets in bunches at Malvern as a junior and fully took over the program in his outstanding final year.

“Will had a phenomenal senior season,” Harmatuk said. “One of the best individual seasons I’ve ever coached, and he is going to be a huge loss...we’ll have to make that up by committee.”

With several questions left to be answered regarding how the Friars will make up for losing the likes of Powers and 6-foot-6 inside threat Mike Hollingsworth, and a large amount of inexperience on his roster with which to fill the void, Harmatuk is optimistic about the upcoming season, but isn’t yet entirely sure what to expect.

“I’m really excited for this season,” he said. “I don’t really have any expectations, we’ve got a lot of new faces, so it’s going to be exciting to see where it leads.

“It’s going to be like a big experiment,” he added. “I really have no idea where it’s going to go.”

A large factor in that excitement is the fact that – despite lacking the level experience possessed by his past squads – his roster entering 2016-17 is a significantly better fit for his run-and-gun game plan, a style that Inter-Ac teams only really see when they face the Friars.

“It’s a bunch of guys who can play different positions,” he said. “It’s a bunch of guys who can dribble, pass and shoot. Last year, we ran the floor really, really well, and if we didn’t get a shot early, we’d look to Will to get us a basket. This year, I think we’re going to be able to spread the floor, have five guys who can dribble, shoot and pass, so it’ll be a much more open style, with the ability to switch and have guys play multiple positions.”

In order to help pull together a team that Harmatuk thinks could have as many as five freshmen on the varsity roster, seniors Tommy Wolfe (9.7 ppg) and Ray Baran (6.4 ppg) will be tasked with major leadership roles on and off the court.

As the first class of seniors to be coached Harmatuk for their entire careers, both Wolfe and Baran are three-year starters who are quite familiar with his system, and will therefore be able to use their experience to the fullest in the upcoming campaign.

Their leadership will be paramount right out of the gate, with showdowns against the likes of Roman Catholic, St. Joe’s Prep, Archbishop Carroll and La Salle waiting on the early-season slate.

“It’s going to be really important for them (to lead),” Harmatuk said. “Their leadership is going to be an integral part of our season.”

In 2015-16, Wolfe and Baran were juniors on a team that went 15-12 in the regular season, finished 5-5 in the Inter-Ac and lost in the second round of the PAISAA playoffs to the vaunted Westtown School.

In terms of their performance in conference, the Friars leap-frogged Haverford to sit in third place in the Inter-Ac standings, stuck behind the annual 1st-and-2nd-place combo of Germantown and Episcopal that has reigned in the league since Harmatuk moved from Texas to take the Friars’ helm.

He believes that in order to finally have any shot at maybe being the team to play spoiler and chip away at the cemented top two of GA and EA – teams that have eked out close wins over the Friars in recent memory – his team needs to focus most heavily on the defensive end.

“Our next step is we have to get better on defense,” he said. “Our issue hasn’t been scoring, we’ve had close games that we haven’t been able to put away, and I think if we can get some stops, more timely stops, we’ll be able to get some of those close games we’ve lost the last few years. That’s going to be one of our main focuses once we get going, we’re going to put a lot of emphasis on the defensive end. With so many new faces, it’s going to be a challenge.”

Other players returning include a pair of juniors – 6-foot-5 wing Billy Corcoran (3.9 ppg)and 6-foot-1 guard Brady Devereux (4.6 ppg) – who both play for Malvern Prep’s powerhouse baseball team, as well as sophomore guard Tygee Sharp.

In those two juniors, and Corcoran in particular, Harmatuk has seen rapid growth, the kind that Malvern will need out of its upperclassmen in order to be successful this season.

“Billy Corcoran has really grown up,” he said. “We played at the Downingtown West shootout and he played really, really well for us, so I expected Billy to have a big year.”

Rounding out the roster are the five freshmen, all of which classify as guards, who each bring something different to the team according to their head coach.

Between Rhadir Hicks, a pure point guard and strong defender; Deuce Turner, a talented scorer; Isaac White, an energetic spark plug on the court; Spencer Cochran, a knockdown shooter; and varsity-JV swing player Jarod Wade, Malvern will have a pretty deep stable of guards through 2021.

“I think we’ll have as much depth as we ever had,” Harmatuk said. “That shouldn’t be an issue.”

That said, half of that depth is essentially comprised of freshmen, who will need to grow up pretty quickly to ensure Malvern Prep’s success.

And with such a large group of new players on the roster, Harmatuk can’t emphasize enough the importance of his four upperclassmen and the leadership role they will have to fill.

“Those guys are going to have to be leaders in practice every day,” he said. “There’s a bunch of (young) guys that have a chance to step up, and we need Ray, and Tommy, and Billy and Brady to help with the system and teach the guys what we do. They’ll be able to handle it.”

“This is the most talented basketball team that I’ve coached in my four years,” he added. “But it’s young and inexperienced.”

Because of that, Harmatuk enters this campaign knowing that, in his words, “it’s not going to be about wins and losses.” His optimism is high and he believes the talent level on his team is equally high, but with the question marks he still has yet to have answered, his biggest hope for the upcoming season is what he admittedly considers a “cliché.”

But that doesn’t make it any less important.

“We’re going to be talking in terms of getting better each day,” he said. “How, as a coaching staff, we’re going to get to build this season is going to be fun.”