What I remember best is the never-ending dread. The first day of basketball practice.
From the time I rolled out of bed (whenever), sat through class, hung out in the lounge, pretended to study in the library, ran into teammates and exchanged grim, doomed looks, and hurried through an early dinner in the cafeteria – I knew it was out there waiting, inevitable and unavoidable.
Now they call it Midnight Madness now. Then it was just the first day of practice.
Allentown being Allentown, the Centaurs being the Centaurs, Day One was its own microcosm of what this nascent little school was all about and trying to become. We students were the college’s only resource. What else was there? This meant the basketball team – like everything else going on — was only going to be as good as we students believed we could make it.
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“That First Day of Practice” here on HoopsU.com appeared originally on CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the basketball beginnings of the half-good, half-bad, all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center Valley, Pa. Steve played on four of the school’s first seven teams, was MVP senior year and in 1974 graduated in the sixth class.
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The Centaur program was still at a place where a lot of guys (yeah, like me) thought maybe they had a chance here at Allentown to play some college ball, be a varsity guy. So on Day One a ton of guys usually showed up.
“The first day of practice my freshman year there had to be thirty guys who tried out,” says E.J. Brookes, who played one year before becoming the manager. “I got to talking with some of them and they said, “Oh, yeah, everybody comes to the first day and then they don’t show up the next. I remember all kinds of guys coming out for just that first practice. And some of them were good. They just didn’t want to play. They didn’t want the hassle of it.”
Every year there were a couple three guys who likely would have made the team if only they’d stuck it out. I can think of a couple more who never tried out at all who would have played for sure, two who maybe would have started, one who might have been a difference maker.
“Some would argue,” says Chris Cashman, a four-year Centaur stalwart, “that there were better players playing intramurals than on the team. For one reason or the other, people didn’t take it seriously, or they couldn’t afford the time.”
We practiced five nights a week and Saturday mornings. Played 16 to 20 games a season, at least one during exam week. Came up during Christmas break. Got back from eight, 10 away games past midnight. All for a tiny little no-name, no-where college.
“That was part of the deal, and the challenge, as well,” Jerry Wilkinson says. In everything the college was trying to be, it was only going to be what we students could make it become. “That’s what it always came back to,” Wilk says. “Whatever had to be done, we had to do it.” The very thing that made being at the school right then, right there, so unique, so special, so completely ours.
“Not everyone wanted to play basketball,” Wilk says. “There was no impetus to play.”
Unless, Wilk says, “Unless you had the desire.”
Wilk got to Allentown as a second-semester freshman during the 1968-69 year, the first intercollegiate season. Shootin’ around one day down at Billera, John Compardo – Coach Compardo, the school’s still-revered first athletic director – told Wilk to go out for the team.
“I said, ‘Coach, I didn’t play basketball in high school,’ ” Wilk says. “ ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Coach said. ‘Just go out for the team.’ ”
Wilk is solidly built, but only about 5-foot-11. Clearly, though, Coach Compardo liked what he saw of Wilk’s lefty jumper: picture perfect, with that dramatic pause at the top. And Wilk could get off the ground.
“All I was hoping to do was make the team because it was the best basketball being played on campus, and that’s what I wanted to be doing,” Wilk says. “I think that’s the way most of us thought. We were just happy to be able to play the game, to play it as hard as we could. I really enjoyed playing the game with my teammates — at a level I never suspected I would ever play.” Senior year, a forward giving up to many inches underneath, Wilk led the team in rebounding.
Chris Cashman had been the classic last man cut at O’Hara, one of those gigundo high schools with a top-notch program in the Philadelphia Catholic League. He stayed with the team as manager, took it all in, absorbed everything. His best friend was Tom Inglesby, star of the team, who would go onto glory at Villanova.
“Tommy saw [the game] rightly as not only a vehicle to a free education but as an avenue to a career in basketball,” Cash says. “I could only judge the experience that I thought I would get against the way I knew a successful high school program was run. That’s what I brought to Allentown. I viewed it as an opportunity to do something I hadn’t been successful at on a high school level.” Freshman year Cash was the team leader in rebounds and field-goal percentage.
For others, Allentown represented a big leap.
“It was college,” says P.J. Brennan. P.J. had played high school ball in the Pennsylvania coal country, a 2,000-point guy. The competition at Billera, he says, was still an eye opener. “It was better basketball than I had ever played,” he says. “I knew making the team was going to be a stretch, and it was, but I did.” As a freshman – his only season – P.J. led the team in free-throw percentage and ended the year a starting guard.
I have already told my story. And I could go on and on with other teammates who made the decision to stick with it, hang in, not quit. Help make the Centaur be what it could become. Instead I’ll let Tony Mazzeo speak for them all (and me).
Maz was a senior co-captain with Wilk, fiery and volatile. He played soccer, basketball and baseball. He was a very good soccer player. Basketball, by his own admission, not so much.
“I didn’t have the moves. I didn’t have the smoothness. I didn’t have the shooting. So what could I do? I could hustle. I could dive. I could steal the ball. I scored some points, but my strong point was determination.”
As a freshman he had played on the first collegiate team, the one that went 3 and 14. “We still had a full team show up for practice every day,” he says. “I think we all felt that we had found that place where this was finally, you know, ‘my chance.’ To us this was North Carolina. That’s the way it was. This was the level we could make, and we were going to make the most of it.
“I was totally impressed with myself when I made the team my freshman year,” he says. “Totally impressed.”
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE CENTAUR SEASONS WEBSITE
CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.
Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.
He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).
For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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