City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Christian Ray caught a bug over the summer, and the rest of his Haverford School teammates have picked it up.

In July, Ray was brought up to the senior team of the Team Philly AAU program, the K-Low Elite squad which played on the Adidas Gauntlet circuit. There, he learned that just because he stood at 6-foot-5, he wasn’t going to be able to be the dominant force he’d been in two years at Octorara and on the younger levels of AAU basketball.

The program’s director, Lonnie Lowry, and K-Low Elite head coach Kyle Sample instilled in Ray the mindset he needed.

“They’re the ones who told me you see the ball, get it,” Ray said. “It doesn’t matter what’s in front of you, just grab it with your hands and fight for everything you could get.”

It’s a mentality that he’s clearly bought into at his new school, and one that the rest of the Fords are buying into with excellent results.

Ray’s energy on the glass was certainly infectious on Thursday, as the Haverford School dominated the rebounding battle against Friends’ Central in a 65-58 non-league road win. The 6-5, 190-pound wing finished with 22 points and a game-high 18 rebounds, including 10 on the offensive end alone.

That met his personal goal of 15 rebounds per game, and then some.

"It’s all about positioning," he said. "As long as you’re in the right position, that helps a little bit, but you’ve got to fight through it.”

There were several possessions that took Ray two or three attempts to get the ball into the bucket or get to the foul line, but there was no denying he couldn’t be stopped by anybody on the Friends’ Central defense.

Any ball that came off the rim, on either end of the floor, Ray was there to either corral it himself or try to tip it to a teammate.

“He plays with a high motor, he plays hard from start to finish,” head coach Bernie Rogers said. “He leaves it all out there, which is really impressive, and I think it gets contagious with his teammates.”

Indeed, Ray wasn’t the only player on the Fords (7-1) with multiple offensive rebounds. Fellow sophomore Jameer Nelson Jr., a 6-1 guard, finished with five offensive boards, as did junior forward Bobby Stratts; both 6-1 junior guard Kharon Randolph and 6-5 sophomore Asim Richards had a pair of their own teammates’ misses.

That stat alone was a big reason Haverford was able to finally wear down Friends’ Central (5-5) after the Phoenix jumped out to an 11-point lead in the first quarter.

“We came out really slow but we kept fighting, kept trying to crash the boards,” Ray said. “Got a lot of second-opportunity shots, so that’s what really pushed us over the edge against them.”

A Division I recruit with offers from Drexel and Bowling Green already on the table, Ray is off to a terrific start to the year as a reclassified sophomore. Averaging 19.1 ppg to go along with double-figure rebounds for the Fords, he’s a big reason why they’re going to be a serious threat to challenge four-time defending champion Germantown Academy and Episcopal Academy for the Inter-Academic League championship.

Ray had the two biggest buckets of the game, a left-handed layup to break a tie game with 1:45 remaining, and then a right-handed take to make it a three-point game with under a minute to play.

Friends' Central committed two of its many turnovers on its next two possessions, as Randolph (16 points) knocked down four foul shots to seal the win.

Senior guard Antone Walker, a Wesleyan commit, led Friends' Central with 25 points. Junior wing Justin Steers added 15 for the Phoenix (5-5); both Walker and Steers had seven rebounds.

Randolph -- the only junior in a starting lineup otherwise full of sophomores -- is happy with the program’s progress in the second year under Rogers’ reign, but is far from content as Haverford still looks for its first Inter-Ac title since 1999.

“[There’s] a lot of work to do, to be where we want to be,” he said. “We’re not done yet and we’re motivated to do whatever needs to be done to get what we deserve and what we want to get.”