Plymouth Whitemarsh to open against a familiar face
The Plymouth Whitemarsh boys basketball team opens its season at home Friday night and one of the programs greatest players will be on the opposing side.
Chuck Moore returns to his old stomping grounds as the Coatesville High School head coach.
“He was getting tired of looking for an opening game and so was I,” PW head coach Jim Donofrio said. “Sometimes you just get tired of calling people and waiting. Neither of us does a tip off tournament. I like to open at home if I can and it’s kind of hard to find people that aren’t in tip offs any more.
“I thought it would be nice to recognize Chuck for what he’s accomplished as a head coach now down at Coatesville and just bring him home. Hope he’s not disrespectful to me.”
Moore is the fourth highest scorer in Plymouth Whitemarsh history with 1,532 points in three seasons from 1995-97. He was the leading scorer on the 1997 state championship team.
Donofrio and Moore’s relationship goes back a long way, to when the 37-year-old Moore was six and Donofrio was friends with his father. Donofrio coached Moore as a freshman on JV in 1994 and was an assistant on the varsity teams the next three years.
Moore went on to play in college at Seton Hall and Vanderbilt. He returned to Plymouth Whitemarsh to coach under Donofrio for seven years before taking over at Coatesville in 2013.
“I’m not a giant fan of it because he knows every single way I think,” Donofrio joked about opening against Moore. “Nothing about that is smart. Kind of throwing caution to the wind, but he was willing to come up so I thought we’ll take the emotional factor into consideration and just hope we’re good Friday night, because he knows what he’s doing and he knows all my secrets.”
New-look Colonials
The PW team that won the District 1 championship in 2016 graduated five starters. That doesn’t change the expectations for this year.
“This isn’t the typical ‘you lost five starters — you’re rebuilding,’” Donofrio said. “Three of the guys on the floor were on the floor at Temple to win the district. There’s Matt Walker who could have played more minutes last year. The twins Ahmin and Ahmad Williams basically were 20-minute guys, they just didn’t start, but they could have. That was a fairly deep team last year, but this team is probably deeper. This team is probably 10 or 11 deep.
“They’re so hungry, which is terrific. I think they should have a lot of pride having accomplished what we accomplished last year, of course there’s seven of them back, they all got to taste it to some degree. You also have a team that is expected in the general sense to be one of the better teams around. My thing is — coming off the District 1 title last year — how do you handle that? Do you handle championships with a little too relaxed of a demeanor coming back? Do you understand what it took? And are we capable of it again this year? I think we are, but it’s a lot different.”
Last year’s squad featured two primary scorers — Xzavier Malone and Mike Lotito — who combined for 36 points per game. Donofrio isn’t sure how the scoring is going to play out this season.
“We have to see who is going to replace the Xzavier Malone-Mike Lotito 800-some points,” he said. “Who’s going to replace that? We might get it with seven guys. We might get it with four guys. I don’t know.
“We’ve taken the whole offseason to literally develop a whole different look of a team. It really runs offense — very, very team-oriented. Very unselfishly … Now I don’t know who those scorers are going to be every night, which makes you a little bit nervous, but to me that’s one of the things we’re going to have to see — who’s going to consistently put the ball in the basket. That could be a good thing or that could be a bad thing.”
The high-energy Williams twins figure to be big parts of the team’s plans, along with seniors Walker and Cheo Houston and sophomore 6-11 center Naheem McLeod.
“(McLeod) has basically done everything he was supposed to do in the offseason,” Donofrio said. “He’s essentially in the gym seven days a week. He did what he was supposed to do and he has probably improved his game by 35% and that’s big. He’s a major difference now.”
Martin Luther King transfer Ish Horn also adds an element to the Colonials. Donofrio believes the junior is a Division 1 caliber guard.
“Ish is very similar in abilities like Xzavier Malone,” Donofrio said. “Very similar in skill level and athleticism. In an open floor game, he may end up being our most natural scorer and may end up potentially leading the team in scoring. Whether he starts or not — I don’t know if that matters as much as the more he figures things out — a month from now we’ll know what happened, what kind of impact he had. He’s very gifted as a player.”
