Think of the Flyers as an explorer who landed on a deserted island. On this island, deep within miles of thick jungle, is treasure. The explorer knows the treasure is there somewhere, and he aims to find it.
Leo Carlsson would have been a new machete: sharp, strong, capable of cutting through all those vines and branches and trunks to make the Flyers’ journey to those riches easier and faster. Now the explorer won’t have that tool. Now that the Anaheim Ducks have matched the five-year, $90-million offer sheet that Carlsson signed with the Flyers last week, the Flyers won’t have the steel blade that Carlsson represented as a 6-foot-3, 21-year-old, clear-cut first-line center just entering his prime.
So where does that leave them? It means that their trek to that treasure, to their first Stanley Cup since 1974-75, will likely be slower and less certain. They may get to it eventually, but it’s going to take more time and be more costly.
Had the Ducks declined to match the Flyers’ audacious offer — and make no mistake, this gambit by Danny Brière was bold and creative, as close to a Now youse can’t leave move as an NHL general manager can make — Anaheim would have received four first-round picks from the Flyers. That price would have been steep. But the Flyers would have added Carlsson, who averaged nearly a point a game last season, is an excellent player now, and has shown every sign that he will get even better.
They need a No. 1 center, not merely for the talent and scoring touch such a player would provide, but also so they can slot their other centers — Trevor Zegras, Christian Dvorak, and Sean Couturier — more appropriately. With Carlsson (or any center of similar caliber, for that matter), Zegras would have become the second-line guy. Dvorak would have become a terrific third-line guy. And Couturier would have remained in the role he played so well in last season’s playoffs, as an outstanding fourth-line checker, faceoff-taker, and leader.
What’s more, the Flyers have a roster and a farm system with plenty of promising young players, and if this move had come to fruition, they wouldn’t have had to sacrifice any of them to fill one of their biggest holes. That’s perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this result for them: That luxury of gaining an emerging superstar without having to give up valuable players and/or prospects already within the organization likely is no longer available to them.
With the Carlsson episode behind him, Flyers general manager Danny Brière must be practical about the team’s range of needs.
They’re interested in the Detroit Red Wings’ Dylan Larkin, for instance; though Larkin is 7½ years older than Carlsson, he still would fit the Flyers like a well-tailored suit. But assuming Larkin, who has a full no-movement clause, is even willing to join the Flyers, the trade package necessary to acquire him would probably have to include a player or two on their current roster. Would Larkin be worth the departure of, say, Owen Tippett and/or Denver Barkey?
Just because Brière made such a huge play for Carlsson doesn’t mean he has to answer that question, immediately or ever. The smartest thing he and the Flyers’ leadership team have done in the three years since he took over as GM has been to give themselves flexibility in improving the team. They didn’t have to shock the NHL by presenting that offer sheet to Carlsson — a proposal for a contract that has now made him the league’s highest-paid player. But they did. After years of running in place, after qualifying for the postseason for the first time since 2020, they declared that they were ready to spend again, but they made that declaration on their terms.
They have several choices for how they can proceed. They need not just a No. 1 center, but a top-pair defenseman, or at least one capable of quarterbacking a power play. They can act quickly to acquire one or both of those players, to find short-term and/or long-term answers to those lingering questions, or they can wait.
Remember: Even if they had won their duel with the Ducks for Carlsson, the Flyers wouldn’t have been considered a true contender this season for the Stanley Cup. Porter Martone, Matvei Michkov, Tyson Foerster, Jamie Drysdale, Alex Bump, Zegras: All of them have growth and development ahead of them. Yes, the Flyers’ hunt will take longer now that Leo Carlsson, that oh-so useful tool, will remain on the West Coast, but they can still find that chest of gold. They just have to take care not to get lost along the way.
One person after another shuffled toward her from the funeral line snaking down the center aisle, through the vestibule of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, out to Forest Avenue in Ambler, and I wondered as I approached her how long Meg Kane could keep this up. The sad, grateful smile. The long, tight hugs. The posture she maintained, straight as a soldier, when the shock and grief simmering within her should have sent her to her knees.
It was Friday, April 12, 2024. Eight days had passed since the house fire that killed her parents — the kind of unbelievable tragedy that interrupts a local newscast, helicopters hovering over the smoldering ruins. Unbelievable, too, because it had happened to Meg. Over the quarter-century that we have been close, she has risen through the public relations industry to a place of power and influence within Philadelphia without compromising the qualities that made her, above all else, a decent human being. It always seemed that her intelligence and drive, her character and achievements, melded to form a shield that would protect her from catastrophe. Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like Meg, I thought that day, as if such a thought were anything other than a mind trick, a weak attempt to reconcile how and why my friend’s mother and father were dead.
The line stretched to more than 200 people, perhaps more than 300. No one standing in it should have been surprised at its length. Meg had relationships and connections throughout the Delaware Valley, of course, but more than that, she and her family had embodied the blending of some beautiful and long-conflicted aspects of Philadelphia’s history and culture. They had learned to live with and revel in the tensions inherent in certain traditions here. Their roots were that deep. Their hearts were that open. Hers most of all.
That background is one reason Meg has been the ideal face of the campaign to bring the World Cup to Philadelphia and promote it once it was here, to play up and celebrate the happy marriage of soccer and the city. It also is the reason that — through every match, every publicity event, every meeting, every long and restless night before and during this tournament, all while the eyes of the globe had been on Philadelphia — she has been holding all that pride in the same palm as so much pain.
Meg Kane looks at a photo of her mother among old family photos in her Philadelphia apartment in May. The photos were recovered from the scene of an April 2024 house fire in Ambler that killed both of her parents.
Everything essential in life
There she is again. Another quickie interview on Fox29. Another guest spot on a PHLY Sports panel. Another four paragraphs of insightful quotes to us at The Inquirer. Another Amtrak ride up to New York or 14-hour flight to Doha, Qatar, to see what she could learn, then another debrief with her colleagues at Philadelphia Soccer 2026. Here’s what they did. Here’s why it did or didn’t work. Here’s what we can and should do.
Nothing new for Meg Kane. Nothing out of the ordinary. Revitalizing Tastykake’s brand and business when its headquarters relocated from Hunting Park to the Navy Yard … making ready the way for Pope Francis’ visit to town in 2015 … counseling the Philadelphia Orchestra and the archdiocese … all this at the tenderest of ages, all this before she turned 45 in January.
“When the odds are against us,” said her friend Christopher Pinto, the development lead of the Philly Pops, “this city calls Meg Kane to make the impossible possible.”
Meg Kane (center) speaks at a press conference about preparations for the FIFA World Cup in May at Lincoln Financial Field.
Who was better to evangelize about Philadelphia, to make the case that it was an ideal location for the biggest event in the world’s most popular sport? Who else had the requisite combination of local expertise and enthusiasm to share the multitudes that the city contained? Meg’s mother, Debbie, and biological father, Richard, had divorced not long after Meg was born. Debbie then married Steve Wood in September 1983 — a Little Flower alumna and a North Catholic graduate reconnecting 15 years after they’d met as teenagers on the Wildwood boardwalk.
Meg wasn’t yet 3 when Steve became her stepfather, but the word was appropriate only in its most literal sense. He was Dad, too, and she was his daughter, full stop, and everything that was essential in his life became essential in hers …
… and everything included their early-afternoon car trips together starting when Meg was 7, when Steve would pick her up after another half-day at St. Martin of Tours School and drive down I-95 to 13th and Walnut, to the bar that Steve and his brother, Bill, had opened in 1980, to Woody’s — to the best-known gay social establishment that Philadelphia has ever known. While Steve balanced the books, Meg — still in her Catholic school uniform, her plaid skirt and saddle shoes — sat at the bar, the daytime bartenders fixing her fresh cherry Cokes, making them the right way, muddling the fruit and filling her glass with fountain soda, the little girl chatting up the customers and playing Ms. Pac-Man on the arcade machine upstairs and remaining mostly oblivious, never thinking anything there was strange or sinful, her parents never suggesting anything was.
As a child, Meg Kane’s afternoons sometimes included stops at her dad and uncle’s bar, Woody’s.
The cognitive dissonance might have caused constant friction in one family or torn another apart. It didn’t exist within Meg’s. Steve had one rule about the visits that Meg, her younger sister, Liz, and their younger brother, Stephen, made to Woody’s: If you see someone there you know, keep it to yourself. “It was important we never outed anybody,” Meg said. “At that time, there were people for whom Woody’s was an oasis, an escape, the one place they could be themselves.”
The bartenders there picked up extra work at Liz’s and Stephen’s christening parties. Bill’s partner, Lee Mallon, showed up to the family’s annual Christmas party dressed as Santa. Debbie, who became a principal at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy in Chestnut Hill after years of teaching in the archdiocese, loved to tell the story about the earnest couple who made an appointment to tell her something troubling … except the delicate topic had nothing to do with the couple’s children. The husband had been downtown, and he and his wife had been praying about whether to share what he saw with Debbie, and, well … Your husband walked into Woody’s. And Debbie let out a belly laugh. Oh, I know … By the way, have you forgotten what my last name is?
At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s, Steve and Bill kept employees on the payroll even though they couldn’t work anymore, held celebration-of-life luncheons at the bar, and covered the cost of memorial services and burials when no one else would. Those trips to hospitals and funeral parlors were rarely, if ever, spoken of within the Wood family. Steve’s mother had died when he was 4 and his father when he was 13. His siblings had raised him, and he considered business associates to be friends and friends to be family, and maybe a young woman who later would be charged with uniting a diverse but territorial city behind a common mission had to grow up immersed in such acceptance, such label-free loyalty.
There was Meg, riding with Steve every morning during her high school years from their new home in the Montgomery County suburbs to Academy of Notre Dame in Villanova — a school with a great speech-debate program for a teenager who knew she’d end up talking for a living — the two of them listening to WIP throughout those 45-minute commutes. “It’s how I learned to be a sports fan,” she said. “My passion was cultivated because of our relationship.” There was Liz, going her own way at Mount St. Joseph Academy. There was Stephen, heading off to St. Joseph’s Prep. But it wasn’t until Meg’s freshman year at La Salle, when a male student she didn’t know knocked on the door of her dorm room to thank her — Your family owns Woody’s, right? I don’t know what I would have done without it — that she perceived her family as resting at the center of every Venn diagram of Philadelphia, sharing something in common with every group and subgroup.
I met her during the first semester of her junior year at La Salle, when she took a journalism class I was teaching in the fall of 2001. It is an intimidating thing to be a 26-year-old adjunct professor, to have taught for just two years, and to suspect immediately that one of your students is smarter and wiser and more sophisticated than you are. Ten days into the term, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, she proved she was.
Class began at 9 a.m. I tried to get 20 minutes worth of lecture time in as black smoke billowed from the World Trade Center towers and my students, a few of whom hailed from New York and North Jersey, chewed their fingernails and fidgeted in their chairs. Finally, Meg shot me a look that said, I know you mean well, but … please, we gotta get out of here. When the class reconvened later that week, I asked for the students’ forgiveness for my stupid officiousness, for my failure to read the classroom, and we spent the rest of the period discussing and venting about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. In September 2011, Meg sent me a letter — not an email, not a direct message, a letter, on paper, more permanent — recalling that week. You did what a teacher is supposed to do, she wrote. You earned our trust, and you never lost it. It remains a treasured gift, that letter and its contents, that benefit of the doubt, that measure of grace that I hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve.
By then, Steve and Bill had sold Woody’s and opened another bar, Knock, and Meg had lifted off and would continue climbing in her career: from La Salle — she was her class’s commencement speaker — to graduate school at Maryland; from earning a master’s degree to planning and publicizing some of the city’s biggest events; from getting a text message in November 2019 from Angela Val, who was the CEO of the city’s convention and visitors bureau at the time, to meeting her that night at the Ritz Carlton. We need you, Val told her. We’re going to bid on the World Cup.
It was the project of a lifetime. It gave her the runway and credibility to open her own PR firm, Signature 57, in 2021. It put her front and center as the captain of the city’s World Cup cheerleading squad — “the Pied Piper of Philly soccer,” someone called her. And she still could be the daughter and sister and friend she’d always been, ready at a moment’s notice to give whatever had to be given. Drive five hours one way to attend the funeral of a colleague’s parent? It’s a day. What’s a day? Get off a plane after a week of work in Ireland and head straight to a chamber of commerce dinner that night? Work an 80-to-100-hour week? Of course. How else would she be there for her family if she didn’t excel in her professional life, if she didn’t squeeze her responsibilities and extra efforts into the smallest possible windows of time?
Yes, she thought it, too: Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like me. But things did happen. Debbie retired and, without her work in education, struggled in the void, losing weight, chain-smoking so much that her favorite blanket became pocked with holes where fallen ashes — and even the still-lit tip of one of her Merit Menthols, as she was dozing off — had burned through the wool. Stephen moved back in with his parents after finishing at Penn State and stayed with them for nine years, teaching English at Norwood, helping Steve care for Debbie. Liz and her husband, Michael McCabe, both faculty members at La Salle College High School, lost a baby daughter, Eleanor, and one night, Steve sat with Meg at his dining room table, a Phillies game on TV in the background. He had grown up without a mother and father. He had watched dear friends waste away to a deadly virus. Yes, these things and more did happen, but “my dad,” Meg said, “had an incredibly positive view of the world,” and at the table, he described to her how he had tried to comfort Liz.
Don’t despair, he said. Don’t despair. It’s the only way to keep going.
The horror of a ticking clock
On Thursday, April 4, 2024. Meg was in a room at the Fairmont in Washington, D.C., already awake for close to two hours, writing and rewriting speeches and teleprompter scripts for the Horatio Alger Association Awards, a three-day event for the philanthropic juggernaut that had become a signature project for Signature 57: a CEO’s retirement, the introduction of 12 new members, two major dinners, an undertaking so massive that Meg and four coworkers bunkered for a week in the hotel to complete it.
Still in her pajamas, she was trudging to the bathroom to wash her face when her phone buzzed and lit up pink, the color that meant Liz was calling. She assumed something was wrong with Francis, Liz and Mike’s 4-month-old son.
Meg looked at her phone. It was 6:42 a.m.
Liz?
Meg, she shrieked, I’m watching the house burn down!
What?
I’m watching the news. I’m holding the baby, feeding the baby, and the house is on fire!
Meg told Liz to call the police. She put her phone down and walked to the bathroom, violently shaking, and did not wash her face. She called her boyfriend, Keith Audit, and told him, I need you to find out if my parents’ house in on fire, and Liz called back and said that the police had told her that someone would be in touch and she had tried calling Steve’s phone but it had gone right to voicemail and Liz kept saying, It’s definitely the house, and I don’t know what to do, and then Meg said out loud an irrational thing: We have to call Norwood. Stephen’s a teacher. Stephen’s not going to make it to school. Someone has to let Norwood know to get a sub. And Meg hung up with Liz and called Shannon Craige, Norwood’s curriculum director, who told her the students were on spring break and Norwood was closed.
Meg looked at her phone. It was 6:53 a.m.
She called Stephanie Bambach, the vice president of Signature 57, who was in a room above her. When she arrived at Meg’s room, Bambach was surprised that Meg’s demeanor was as measured as it was. She was not surprised that Meg’s voice was trembling.
I have to finish writing the remarks for Saturday night, Meg said. I’m only halfway done. I can’t leave.
It doesn’t matter, Meg.
Meg reopened her laptop and emailed every document and every draft of every unfinished document to Bambach. She grabbed a black striped sweater and a pair of black leggings, went into the bathroom, and got dressed.
“I remember looking at myself in the mirror,” she said later, “and saying, ‘You will never wear these clothes again.’”
Bambach arranged for a car service to pick up Meg at the hotel and drive her back to Philadelphia. The two of them rode an elevator down to the lobby. Meg held her room key. She tried to hand it to Bambach.
In case, Meg said, someone needs to use my room.
Bambach didn’t take the key. Keep it. Good thoughts. It’s going to be OK. You might come back.
I’m not coming back, Meg said. It’s not going to be OK.
In the back seat of a black sedan, Meg’s phone rang again.
I’m at the house, Liz said. I just spoke with a detective. Mommy and Daddy didn’t make it.
Meg took a deep breath. Where. Is. Stephen?
He’s OK, Liz said. He got out.
Meg looked at her phone. It was 7:43 a.m.
The black sedan pulled up to her apartment. Keith was waiting for her. She threw her bags in his car, and they drove to Temple University Hospital’s burn unit. Stephen was there, in a bed in a room in the back, his face and body covered in soot. That acrid, sickening odor. Physically, somehow, he was fine.
“We were the luckiest people on that floor,” Meg said later. “He was going to get out of that bed and go home. That day couldn’t have been worse, but my God, it could have been.”
She looked at her phone. It wasn’t yet 11 a.m.
Miles away
Two months. That’s how long she stepped away. From the World Cup campaign. From Signature 57. From everything except what was gone and what remained.
The fire’s official cause was undetermined. Its damage was incalculable. Steve and Debbie had no wills. Their birth certificates and Social Security cards were gone. Meg had to pick up the mail and pay the mortgage and pay other bills and access both their personal bank account and the finances for Knock and show up for every meeting with every lawyer and builder and contractor, everything moving incredibly fast and in slow motion at the same time, so many dear memories now coldly cataloged on an Excel spreadsheet.
She did not talk about the fire at all in public and only rarely in private. Her last name was not Wood; few strangers, if any, knew her connection to the tragedy. The relative anonymity was meager relief from the pressure she piled on herself. Who else could handle the fallout? Who else could inch everyone a little closer to normal again? It had to be her.
She didn’t have a newborn to raise, like Liz and Mike did. She hadn’t awakened in the dead of night to dodge flames and hold her breath to keep smoke from seeping into her lungs, like Stephen had. Hell, her poor brother couldn’t even cradle his baby nephew two months after their parents’ deaths: A potent combination — a crackle of July 4 fireworks and a quick post-traumatic contemplation of the fragility of human life — compelled him to hand Francis off to someone, anyone, before something terrible happened again. Nothing she was dealing with came close. Hell, she had been 150 miles away when the house went up. She hadn’t even been there.
Her friends worried that she was pushing herself to the brink of a breakdown and beyond. “She’s really not someone who leans on people,” Bambach said. “I wish she had leaned on us more in the aftermath. So much of her identity is who she is as a leader of Signature, of Philly Soccer, and accepting help from people was a position she was really uncomfortable with. As her friend, I had moments when I wished she would just ask for help.”
Two months. She couldn’t bring herself to take more time away from work. She ping-ponged between her guilt over what she had to do for her family and her guilt over her desire to return to her career. “I really struggled with that,” she said. “Everyone is replaceable at work. If I’m not there, does it run better without me? Are people doing better? Philadelphia World Cup 2026 — is it running better and smoother? Are they finding this to be easier without me? I thought about that even with Signature 57. I’m the founder and CEO, and I still grapple with that. You can go to dark places.”
Meg Kane was out of town the night a house fire killed her parents.
The things that remain
On the kitchen table of her Fairmount apartment, Meg Kane reached into a box to handle the delicate pieces of her parents’ past and her present. Three pages from a memoir by talk-show host Mika Brzezinski, their edges singed black, survived the fire; Meg found them when she first returned to the house’s site. A couple of old family photo albums, the pictures mounted under sticky plastic, the books stashed in a sealed Tupperware container, seem untouched, save for their smoky smell. “It’s really hard to …” she said. “It takes you back there.” So does a black magnetic card that she lifted out of the box. The key to her room at the Fairmont. She kept it.
There’s a vision she can’t shake: Steve waking Stephen up, making sure he got out of the house, then remaining at Debbie’s side, knowing he could not leave her, his children knowing he never would. He had to be so scared in those final moments. He had to be so brave.
“At the end, there’s just grief,” Meg said. “I’m not sure I’ve dealt with the grief. I don’t know I’ve felt it all the way. I don’t know that I’ve allowed it to be something I fully felt.”
So she stores it away, lets it out only during the brief and rare breaks in her schedule, when the events and interviews have paused and some stillness and quiet return to her life. In May, Stephen proposed to his girlfriend, and at the engagement party, Meg pulled him aside for a conversation. It lasted 15 minutes. “It was the talk that everybody was avoiding all night,” he said, a talk about how much he had grown over the last few years, “the kind of talk you would want from your mom or dad.”
It was the happiest moment in a spring and summer that have had many happy ones. She partied on Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park and marched with several hundred Croatian soccer fans from Center City to Old City and rode a subway train quaking from the chants and songs of Brazil’s futbol fanatics, and she saw Philadelphia reveal itself as a world-class sports showcase. They are just Band-Aids, to be sure, covering the paper cuts of knowing that her parents never got to meet their son’s fiancée or hear their grandson speak his first word. But for those of us fortunate enough to call her a friend, they are the answer to the question we were asking as we stood in that church two years ago. How would she get through each day? How would she keep this up?
She did it by holding on to something a father told his daughters. She did it in the only way any of us can. She remembered that she has loved and is loved, and she did not despair.
If you didn’t believe it before, you need to understand it now: Donald Trump never should have picked up that phone, never should have put in that call to one of his toadies, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, and never should have tried to exert his icky influence in a sport rife with corruption.
The 4-1 loss by the U.S. men’s national team to Belgium on Monday night at Lumen Field in Seattle was a fitting result. It was an embarrassing end to the World Cup for the home country. It was cosmic payback for a club that hoped to benefit from a president who wanted to strongarm Team USA into the quarterfinals and found out that sports can resist even an autocrat’s attempts to stack the deck.
Sometimes, once you show you’re willing to wallow in the mud, you can never wash the stain away. The justifications for the Trump administration’s overtures to FIFA to wipe out the one-game suspension for Folarin Balogun — and for FIFA’s acquiescence — were oh-so easy and obvious: This is FIFA.
U.S. forward Folarin Balogun (20) was the center of attention against Belgium in the World Cup’s round of 16 on Monday.
This is an organization with a history of scandal and corruption so long and detailed that Robert Caro could only begin to chronicle it. This kind of back-scratching and deal-making is nothing new at soccer’s highest level. This is how things work, and everyone knows it and holds their nose against the stench, and all the complaints from Belgium and the other countries left in the World Cup were nothing but rank hypocrisy.
If another national team were in the same situation that the USMNT found itself after Balogun was hit with that questionable (at best) red card last Wednesday against Bosnia and Herzegovina, its president or prime minister would have done the same thing Trump did, right? Any means necessary in an every-country-for-itself system, right?
Wrong. The corrective to dishonor and dishonesty isn’t to do more dishonorable things. Yet that was the remedy that Trump sought and put Team USA in the position of accepting. No, Balogun never deserved a red card and the subsequent suspension. Yes, it was a terrible call. But terrible calls happen at all levels of sports, because sports — at least until the gamblers and robots take them over completely — are officiated and overseen by human beings, and errors and mistakes are part of the game.
Stuff happens, and you deal with it as best as you can, and no one gets a do-over days later just because Donald Trump says so. His actions wouldn’t have been appropriate in youth soccer — imagine a parent of a punished player pressuring a league’s commissioner to lift a suspension and the commissioner giving in — let alone in the biggest sporting event on the globe.
What’s more, Trump and those who supported or tolerated his interference in The Balogun Affair apparently never stopped to consider that he might be damaging his own national team’s chances. In that 2-0 victory over Bosnia, Balogun’s teammates not only survived the final 26-plus minutes of the match without him but also scored shorthanded to extend their lead.
They had become underdogs. They had acquired the momentum that comes with being a team that had to fight adversity and had given a strong indication that it could overcome it.
But once FIFA reversed its decision, that entire narrative — that sense that the USMNT might use Balogun’s suspension as inspiration and triumph in the face of an unjust call — disappeared. Now, the USMNT wasn’t the tough, resilient bunch that could withstand the absence of its best player. Now it was so out of its depth without Balogun that it needed the shady political boss to cut a deal in the smoke-filled room to bail it out.
Belgium players react after their team scored one of four goals against the United States in Monday’s round-of-16 World Cup match.
Well, the Americans fit that pathetic profile Monday night. They allowed Belgium to take an early lead, then gave up the winning goal just 61 seconds after Malik Tillman tied the game at 1, then conspired to commit a crushing gaffe when goalkeeper Matt Freese played the ball outside the box, burped it up, and watched Hans Vanaken roll a shot past him for a two-goal Belgium edge.
They were outplayed, outmatched, and outclassed, their performance all the more humiliating for the strings that their president had pulled for them, for the message that he had sent about their chances.
Donald Trump told the world that these athletes needed a man willing to act like a mob boss to make things easier for them, that the USMNT wasn’t strong enough to take home victory on its own and without his help. It turned out he was right. He treated them like losers, and on Monday night, they met his expectations.
Philadelphia Catholic League basketball was a fixture for Kevin Grugan — a mild obsession, even — throughout his childhood. Growing up in Rhawnhurst, he had deep and natural ties to Father Judge’s program in particular. His uncle, Ron Zawacki, was an assistant under legendary head coach Bill Fox, and Grugan competed in Judge’s summer basketball camps, went to the Crusaders’ games on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons in the winter, and graduated from the school in 1996.
“I would watch the games,” he said, “and be enthralled.”
His fascination had faded by 2007, when Lower Merion High School’s administration hired him to teach math and assist Gregg Downer, the school’s longtime boys’ basketball coach. The subsequent years have not reignited his nostalgia for the old days of Northeast Philly hoops. In fact, in his role as a coach at a suburban public school, Grugan has come to resent what he perceives as an uneven playing field throughout Pennsylvania sports. Parochial, private, and charter schools, after all, don’t have borders; they can draw their students, and their student-athletes, from anywhere. Public schools can’t.
Kevin Grugan is a longtime boys’ basketball assistant at Lower Merion.He believes competing against private schools has presented an uneven playing field throughout Pennsylvania sports: “High school athletics is about building a team, building a culture.”
“High school athletics is about building a team, building a culture,” Grugan said recently. “You’re devising competition. You’re learning from that competition. You’re trying to improve on the next game. But you go into those events, and suddenly standing across from you are multiple if not five Division I athletes. You can’t watch enough film to find that very secret flaw that nobody else has found.”
Grugan’s complaints have become common among Pennsylvania’s public school coaches, administrators, parents, and players since the Catholic League and Public League moved under the jurisdictional umbrella of the PIAA in the fall of 2008. And that fierce debate about fairness could soon be cast in stark relief.
In April, the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives passed, by a 178-23 vote, House Bill No. 41, which would allow the PIAA to “establish separate playoffs and championships for athletics for boundary schools and non-boundary schools.” The Pennsylvania Senate can vote on the bill at any time but has not yet. A spokesperson for Gov. Josh Shapiro said that “the Shapiro administration is monitoring the bill as it moves through the legislative process” but did not have a position on it.
Shapiro and his aides might be the only people connected to Pennsylvania’s high school sports who don’t have a position on the bill or the public-private divide.
Imhotep Charter has won six consecutive Public League boys’ basketball titles.
It’s difficult to find a state issue that provokes such strong viewpoints and often-strident opinions. And this issue has plenty of big-picture and hyper-local tentacles, including the professionalization and commodification of high school sports, the question of athletics’ appropriate purpose and role in secondary education, and accusations that some non-boundary schools violate PIAA bylaws by recruiting student-athletes for the sole purpose of having them play sports.
“All we’re trying to do is say that part of high school sports is teaching kids how to play a fair game,” Rep. Scott Conklin (D), who introduced House Bill No. 41 and represents the 77th district, in State College, said in a phone interview. “It’s something they can use for the rest of their lives. We don’t want to teach them that there are two sets of rules: one set for a boundary school, one for a non-boundary school.”
The traditional city and neighborhood rivalries within the Catholic League mean more to some coaches, players, and fans than the district and state tournaments do.
Conklin cited player safety, particularly within football, as a primary reason for House Bill No. 41, arguing that non-public schools can attract more athletes — and more athletes who are bigger, stronger, and faster — than their public opponents can.
“The boundary school may have 18 really good players; they play offense and defense,” he said. “By the second quarter, those kids are tired, and that’s when children get hurt: when they’re gassed.”
He did not provide any statistical evidence to support this claim, and in a Dec. 3, 2024, memo he circulated to state House members to introduce the bill, he made it clear another factor was just as important, if not more so.
“When it comes to competition in team sports, especially football and basketball,” Conklin wrote, “the private, charter, and parochial schools have been dominant in state playoffs in recent years.”
Among the highest-profile sports, that dominance hasn’t been quite as severe as Conklin suggested. Consider these results since the beginning of the fall 2008 sports season:
Boundaryschools have won 54of the 92 football state championships.
Non-boundary schools have won 63 of the 86 boys’ basketball state championships, including 16 of the last 18.
Non-boundary schools have won49 of the 86 girls’ basketball state championships.
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In an attempt to achieve and maintain competitive balance, the PIAA does use a formula, based on non-boundary schools’ success and the number of transfer students they accept, that can allow teams to move up in enrollment classification. Still, St. Joseph’s Prep, with an all-male enrollment of roughly 900 and without a football stadium on its North Philadelphia campus, has won seven PIAA Class 6A championships in the last 10 years while competing alongside the state’s biggest public schools, including North Penn, which has more than 3,000 students. What’s more, a recent donation of $74 million from Prep alumnus and billionaire entrepreneur Nick Howley is likely to help the Hawks separate themselves further from the 6A field.
“They’re just two different structures,” Prep president John Marinacci said. “All our student-athletes, whether it be football or anything else, come from the same geographic locations that our whole student body comes from. I know there are allegations out there that we have students from all over America. You know where the Prep is. It’s 15 minutes from Jersey. Do we have kids who play football who come from Jersey? We do. We also have a lot of kids who play other sports or don’t play sports who come from Jersey. The geographic reach of the school is what it is. We’re a regional school.”
St. Joe’s Prep has won seven PIAA Class 6A football championships in the last 10 years.
‘We’re coming’
Intrastate athletic competition among different types of Pennsylvania high schools is nothing new. In 1972, the state legislature amended the Public School Code to allow non-public schools to participate in postseason and championship events with public schools, and some private and parochial institutions have been members of PIAA leagues and conferences for years. When eight Delaware Valley schools came together to found the Pioneer Athletic Conference in 1985, for example, two of them were Lansdale Catholic and St. Pius X, and the members of the all-girls Catholic Academies League have long competed against suburban Philadelphia public schools within PIAA District One.
The issue took on increased salience both in the region and throughout Pennsylvania, though, when the Catholic and Public Leagues entered the PIAA 18 years ago. At the time, association members who might have raised questions about competitive fairness were cautioned against making any such case, according to a source who was directly involved in negotiating and implementing the expansion. If they did, the legislature would take steps to strip the PIAA of much of its power, oversight, and relevance.
The Public League has 73 member schools. But nearly half of them — 34 — are charters, including football and boys’ basketball powerhouse Imhotep.
“Almost every legislator’s child went to a non-public school,” the source said, “and everybody wants to have that state-championship medal. … They said, ‘Don’t try us, ’cause we’re coming.’”
So the Catholic and Public Leagues formed District 12, and the inclusion of the Public League counterbalanced the injection of private-school strength into the association only so much. The Public League today has 73 member schools. But nearly half of them — 34 — are charters, among them football and boys’ basketball powerhouse Imhotep, and the School District of Philadelphia’s open-enrollment policy can allow exceptional athletes to attend just about any high school and compete for any coaches or programs they want.
For the two leagues, the ostensible reasoning that justified joining the PIAA still stands up. It would lead to more fulfilling experiences for student-athletes: better (or at least more diverse) competition, travel outside the limits of the city and the suburbs that ring it, perhaps more exposure to and interaction with recruiters — and, of course, the opportunity to call themselves state champions.
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“I’d go to college and hear somebody say, ‘We beat Neshaminy in a state championship game,’” said Father Judge basketball coach Chris Roantree, who won a Catholic League boys’ championship as a player with the Crusaders in 1997 before guiding them to back-to-back PCL titles and a PIAA Class 6A championship over the last two years. “I’d be like, ‘We played Neshaminy and beat them by 50. Are you really a state champion?’
“Here’s the thing: Philly is Philly. So if you want all the Philly kids to go to public schools, they’re still going to dominate. There’s so much talent in Philadelphia that it doesn’t matter where it goes. That’s a disadvantage for us. There are six, seven, eight, 10 good teams in the Catholic League. If they’re in the playoffs, they’re going to make some noise in the states. There’s a lot of good players spread out. I laugh at it sometimes, but we can only control what we can control.”
The Catholic and Public Leagues, loaded with student-athletes who have chosen to attend and play for their respective schools, have another advantage over the publics: They are in alignment with the generational shifts and trends throughout youth sports, as young athletes and their parents crave more freedom and place greater importance on AAU, club, and travel teams.
“We need to be looking at increasing the opportunities for kids,” District One chairman Mike Barber said. “If not, they’re going to find other places to play.”
It’s difficult to deny that, in this modern landscape, the PIAA benefits from the presence of private, parochial, and charter schools, that these programs infuse the association’s competition with more talent and prestige.
Liz Potash is the Central Bucks East girls’ basketball coach.She says “when I have to compete for the same championship [as a private school], there’s a disparity there, and I think obviously everyone is aware of that.”
“What they do is unbelievable,” former Central Bucks East girls’ basketball coach Liz Potash said. “We played Archbishop Carroll in our Christmas tournament, and you watch that scout film, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh! This is unbelievable.’ I have all the respect in the world for those programs. Where it gets me is in the postseason, when I have to compete for the same championship. Then it’s just not a level playing field. … I’ll play them in-season. I have no issue with that. But when I have to compete for the same championship, there’s a disparity there, and I think obviously everyone is aware of that.”
The reality that non-boundary schools can and do pull students from New Jersey, Delaware, and the suburbs that feed District One’s public schools has stoked plenty of us-vs.-them tension. Potash herself admitted to rooting for Perkiomen Valley during its run to the 2025 Class 6A girls’ hoops championship, and when CB East beat Germantown Academy — a private, non-PIAA program — last season, one of Potash’s fellow public school coaches called to tell her, Man, there’s nothing I like to see more than when one of us knocks off a team like that.
In 2025, Grace Galbavy, Quinn Boettinger, and Bella Bacani led Perkiomen Valley girls’ basketball to its first state title. The Vikings beat Archbishop Carroll to get there.
“District One and District 12 hate each other,” one area athletic director said, though Starr Davenport, the Philadelphia School District’s director of finance for athletics, tried to soften that assertion by drawing on a familiar rivalry as an analogy.
“You can compare it to almost Dallas vs. the Eagles,” she said. “We don’t really hate them. It’s a healthy, quasi-toxic athletic approach to, ‘We’re better than District One.’ It’s the proximity. It’s the ongoing battles that are close. It gets to the point where it’s one vs. the other, but I think there’s harmony and respect across both districts.”
The irony — and, for many public school coaches, the frustration — is that the traditional city and neighborhood rivalries within the Catholic and Public Leagues mean more to some coaches, players, and fans than the district and state tournaments do. The rollicking sellout crowds filling the Palestra every year for the PCL boys’ basketball semifinals and the boys’ and girls’ championship games have been just the most obvious example.
West Philadelphia coach Adrian Burke values the history of the Public League, and winning the title carries more weight compared to other championships.
“We want to win the Pub,” West Philly High boys’ basketball coach Adrian Burke said in February, before his team lost to Imhotep in this year’s Public League championship game. “It’s legendary. You’re talking about some of the greatest basketball players ever. You’re talking about Wilt Chamberlain, Gene Banks. I could [go] on and on and on. When you think about the Public League, you think about all those guys who paved the way for us to play.
“We don’t care too much about districts. States is good. But we want to win the Pub.”
Father Judge won back-to-back PCL boys’ basketball titles and a PIAA Class 6A championship over the last two years.
A solution?
Splitting the PIAA playoffs into boundary and non-boundary brackets would not be unprecedented, but it would be unusual. New Jersey is one of four states that allows public and private schools to compete during regular seasons but keeps them separate for postseasons, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the USA Today Network. Another four states, including Maryland, don’t permit boundary and non-boundary schools to play against each other.
Grugan wouldn’t mind such a measure, wouldn’t mind seeing House Bill No. 41 signed into law and put into effect. Lower Merion won its last state title in 2013, and in 2019 and every year from 2021 through 2025, it lost in the state playoffs to either Roman Catholic or Archbishop Wood. The question that he, Rep. Conklin, and everyone involved or interested in Pennsylvania high school sports has to ask and answer is this: Is it better to have lost to these non-boundary teams or never to have played them at all?
“We keep making these decisions based on the idea that all high school athletes are performing at this high Division I level,” Grugan said, “and my thing is, most of the high school athletes you’re coaching are going to have a high school basketball experience and that’s it. And by the way, that’s a great thing. That is going to teach them so many lessons, and they’ll be able to thrive in other situations in their lives with amazing memories. We still celebrate big games by getting pizza. That’s as good a moment as anything we’re going to produce on the court.”
Staff news developer Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.
Luc Cherisson did not have to come as far and live as long and hard as so many who have been waiting to watch Haiti in the World Cup again. But he had his own way to make. The general manager of a rental-car business in Atlanta, an immigrant who left his homeland for America when he was just 20, Cherisson is 36 now, with a friendly face and an amiable disposition that suggest he is always happy to assist his customers with their SUV reservations. He flew into Philadelphia International Airport on Friday morning for his home country’s World Cup match against Brazil, and he would fly back to Atlanta on Saturday morning, a little hungover if a slight miracle materialized at Lincoln Financial Field.
“Even if we lose, it’s still a win for me,” he said a few hours before the match, as he lingered in a parking lot outside Xfinity Mobile Arena. “And if Haiti wins, it will be a party all night.”
There was no miracle. There was only an easy 3-0 victory for Brazil, though Cherisson and the thousands of Haitian natives and fans who attended the match may yet have caroused deep into the Philadelphia night, just for the sake of their home country’s presence here. This is Haiti’s first appearance in the World Cup since its only other one, in 1974. For Cherisson and those like him, for a nation long riven with poverty and corruption and violence, where roving gangs control the capital city of Port-au-Prince and practically govern the country, there is honor and glory merely in earning the right to be here.
“It’s amazing,” Cherisson said. “It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. Just being part of the World Cup is fantastic.”
It might sound silly and Pollyannish to regard just competing at the highest level and grandest stage of the world’s most popular sport as worthy of such pride. How much of FIFA’s multibillion-dollar budget goes toward orange slices and participation trophies? But one has to have just an inkling of the hold that soccer has in Haitian society to appreciate why Cherisson would pay a small fortune to travel to Boston to see Haiti’s 1-0 loss to Scotland last Saturday, to make that 24-hour trip into town for Friday night’s game, and to secure tickets for Haiti’s match against Morocco in Atlanta next Wednesday. Why no one at the Linc much cares that Haiti has now been outscored 18-2 in the five World Cup matches in its history. Why this all matters so much.
The author Madison Smartt Bell, for instance, who in 2014 completed a trilogy of rich and gorgeously written historical novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, still owns a patch of land in the northern part of the country, not far from the forests where the revolution was conceived in 1791. One day, Bell saw several children scurrying around on rough, spiny ground, playing soccer not with a ball or even an empty can of condensed milk, but with a rock.
On his next visit to Haiti, he brought them a regulation soccer ball. The children were ecstatic, but after 10 minutes, they paused their game for a moment. Something sharp had punctured and deflated the ball. So they went back to kicking and passing and shooting the stone.
A Haiti soccer fan blows a plastic horn outside of the Discovery Center in Philadelphia earlier on Friday.
“I think that gives you some idea,” Bell said in an email, “of the importance of soccer in Haitian culture.”
If that doesn’t, this might: Before Haiti’s first match in the ‘74 World Cup, against Italy, “extraordinary legends spread all throughout the country,” said Terry Rey, a Temple University professor of Latin American studies who has written extensively about Haiti and even lived there for six years in the 1990s. Customarily, because their national team had not qualified for the World Cup yet, Haitians divided their loyalties when the event commenced every four years. The poor rooted for Brazil, the elites for Argentina.
But now Haiti, at last, was part of the spectacle. So peasants somehow found the funds to buy transistor radios and batteries so they could listen to the match. People painted and decorated tap taps, the vans and pickup trucks that are used as taxis in the country, with renditions of the team’s players. And when Haitian star Emmanuel Sanon scored the game’s first goal, “people will tell you there wasn’t a place in the entire nation where you didn’t hear someone screaming,” Rey said. Italy won the match, 3-1.
Are these unfavorable final scores irrelevant to the Haitian people? No. It’s just that the sport itself carries so much meaning there, offers so cleansing a respite from all that ails the country. The 1994 World Cup began in July with Haiti trapped amid a period of tumult and persecution, its people under the thumb of a junta regime run by Raoul Cédras, the former head of Haiti’s military, who had taken power in a coup three years earlier. From January to June that year, there was no electricity available anywhere. Then, just in time for the World Cup, the lights went on. There was electricity, and there was cable TV. Cédras had bought the rights to broadcast the tournament, and the opportunity to watch it would quell any widespread desire for a revolt against the regime.
“Haitians love soccer,” Rey said. “It’s just powerful.”
They loved it Friday night, despite the lopsided outcome, despite another loss for a nation waiting for a win that would mean everything. Late into the match, late into the night, having traveled so far and still waiting so long, they were chanting and singing in the parking lots and stomping their feet in the stands and standing to cheer, happy to have reason to be proud. Funny. In a city where there is a long and treasured tradition of telling outsiders and interlopers to go kick rocks, this celebration was still joyous enough.
With one trade Friday morning, the Flyers got more interesting. Not immediately. They’re still likely to miss the playoffs this season, which would be the sixth in a row that they’ve failed to qualify for the postseason. For all that time and longer, they’ve been the NHL’s version of late-career Martin Scorsese: Back in the day, they were great and fascinating, and now they’re one suspenseless snoozefest after another. (Seriously, has Killers of the Flower Moon ended yet?)
Their decision to send winger Bobby Brink to the Minnesota Wild for defenseman David Jiříček was an eyebrow-raiser, though. The move in and of itself wasn’t all that surprising, in that the Flyers have a surplus of wingers both on their roster and in their farm system. They were bound to say goodbye to one of them at this trade deadline, and Brink was a prime candidate: At 24, he’s a relatively promising player on a cap-friendly contract.
No, the intrigue of the Brink trade comes from its context. It’s the latest thread in a larger pattern that general manager Danny Brière and team president Keith Jones have been weaving since they took control of the Flyers’ player-personnel department in 2023. Rather than having the team bottom out over a full season or two and ending up with a pick or picks that are at worst among the top five in their drafts, the Flyers are taking risks, some more calculated than others, by acquiring young players who were high draft picks for other clubs.
They did it with Jamie Drysdale, whom the Anaheim Ducks had picked sixth in 2020 before trading him to the Flyers for Cutter Gauthier in January of 2024. They did it with Trevor Zegras — another Ducks draftee, ninth overall in 2019 — when they got him last offseason for Ryan Poehling and two draft picks. They did something similar in 2023 when they drafted Matvei Michkov, who fell to them at No. 7 in part because of worries among NHL clubs that he wouldn’t be leaving Russia for three years, if he was able to leave at all.
Now they’ve done it with Jiříček. Drafted sixth overall in 2022 by the Columbus Blue Jackets, he reportedly was unhappy that the Blue Jackets thought he needed to spend time in the minors. They shipped him to Minnesota in November 2024; there, he bounced between the Wild and its farm team until Friday.
Flyers forward Trevor Zegras has been a shrewd addition after struggling the past two seasons in Anaheim.
At first glance, that’s not an especially appealing player profile: a high draft pick who has been traded twice before his 23rd birthday, once because he was malcontented, once because he couldn’t stick on an NHL roster. And it’s generally acknowledged that Jiříček’s skating has to improve substantially. Still, he is just 22, and he is 6-foot-4 and rugged, and he has a booming slap shot. There are tools there, and there is still time for him to mature into the player he was projected to be.
The Flyers are attempting a daring bit of raindrop-dodging here. They haven’t tanked. They don’t want to tank. They believe it would be corrosive to the franchise as a whole and to the locker room in particular (and it certainly would be to their ticket-sales department). So they are banking — and a team source confirmed Friday that this element was part of their approach — that head coach Rick Tocchet, his staff, and the other power people in the organization can cultivate a strong enough culture that Drysdale, Zegras, Jiříček, and players like them can develop and thrive here even though they didn’t elsewhere.
Michkov is again an instructive example in this regard. After entering the season out of shape and seeing Tocchet limit his ice time, he has been a better player since the Olympic break. The fears within the fan base that Tocchet was angering or alienating him have quelled, and Tocchet’s strategy for handling the most important player on the roster seems to be working, for the time being anyway.
Drysdale hasn’t been the same caliber of player that Gauthier has been — someday, someone will get the full story on why the relationship between the Flyers and Gauthier deteriorated to the point that they felt they had to trade him — but he has come a long way and is just 23. Zegras, 24, has been an excellent addition so far. The Flyers are in need of two major components of a Stanley Cup-contending team — a No. 1 center and a No. 1 defenseman — and Jiříček’s pedigree suggests that he can one day be a top-tier defenseman, assuming a team can figure out how to get the best out of him.
He may or may not become that kind of player. Whether he does or doesn’t isn’t really the point. The point is that the only way the Flyers are going to return to respectability again is by taking some chances and having those gambles pay off. They’re past playing it safe. They might end up exactly where they are now or in even worse shape, but at least they’ve stepped into the casino.
Danny Brière has taken an unconventional and risky path to rebuilding. Time will tell if it pays off.
One afternoon in early December, Bill Raftery and Tim Legler, both La Salle alumni, returned to campus for an hourlong panel discussion about their careers in sports media, only to have the conversation shift to a topic with broader implications.
It was a point of pride for the university to welcome back Raftery, who has been college basketball’s preeminent analyst for more than a quarter-century, and Legler, who has reached a comparable status at ESPN with his insights into the NBA. But 33 minutes into the event, the first question from an audience member wasn’t about the origins of Raftery’s trademark catchphrases (The kiss! … Onions! … Laundry on the deck!) or Legler’s game-film breakdowns.
Bill Raftery, now broadcaster, graduated from La Salle and was inducted into the Big 5 Hall of Fame.
“Can we bring the Big 5 back to its glory?” a man in the auditorium asked. “Because it was a national thing, right? It wasn’t just a Philly thing.”
These days, most people who follow college basketball, if they’re being honest, have to acknowledge that the Big 5 isn’t much of anything anymore. The round-robin rivalries among La Salle, Penn, St. Joe’s, Temple, Villanova, and more recently Drexel have lost most of their juice.
That white-hot competition, fueled by the benign hatred that only proximity and familiarity can ignite, used to define Philadelphia hoops. It has cooled. Now, just one school, Villanova, enters each season with the baseline expectation that it will qualify for the NCAA Tournament, and the pipeline of local recruits that once sustained these programs has all but dried up.
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Three of the six schools — Drexel, La Salle, and Penn — don’t have a Philadelphia native on their rosters. Interest in the city series has plummeted. A 2022 doubleheader at the Palestra drew an official attendance of just 3,300 people. And the Big 5 Classic, conjured in the aftermath of that alarming display of indifference, hasn’t revitalized the rivalries or restored any prestige to them.
While this season has seen an uptick in the programs’ quality of play — Villanova is virtually assured of an at-large bid, and Penn, St. Joe’s, and perhaps Drexel could be strong enough to win their conference tournaments — that improvement hasn’t been enough to stem the dismal tide.
Tim Legler, who led La Salle to the 1988 NCAA Tournament, said the Big 5 was once a “transformative” environment to play in.
For their part, the panelists at La Salle mustered some nostalgia but weren’t optimistic. Legler, who grew up in Richmond, Va., remembered attending a Palestra doubleheader on a recruiting trip and marveling at the atmosphere: the streamers, the cheering, the chanting.
“I turned to my parents and said, ‘This is the environment I want to play college basketball in,’” he said. “It was literally that transformative.”
Still, he had no solution for salvaging the Big 5, and neither did Raftery, who suggested that smaller programs throughout the NCAA would soon be casualties of this new era of college basketball.
“They’re trying to freeze [out] a lot of programs and leagues,” he said, “and I can envision maybe two or three conferences. They’ll run the whole thing, and the networks will pay for it. That’s the way it is.”
It’s convenient to point to the sport’s lurch into modernity — into the era of Name, Image, and Likeness; of pay-for-play; of the permeable membrane of the transfer portal — as the cause of the decline. And it’s true: With the exception of Villanova, which is ensconced in the Big East and supported by engaged donors with deep pockets, college hoops’ evolution has made everything more difficult for the other, more vulnerable programs in the city. But this train has been rumbling down the tracks for a while, and its arrival should compel a reevaluation of the Big 5’s history, of the decisions and unstoppable forces that led it here, to the brink.
To those Baby Boomers and GenXers weaned on the Big 5’s traditions, it’s surely incomprehensible and saddening to hear Raftery contemplate a world without it. But if the institution as Philadelphia knew it is fading away — and it appears to be, if it hasn’t already — the proper question isn’t Can it be saved? That one has been asked and is on its way to being answered.
No, the better questions to chew on are these: How did the Big 5 survive, and at times thrive, as long as it did? And did any of the attempts over the years to preserve it and its identity actually contribute to its downfall?
Villanova has become the only school in the Big 5 that enters each season with the baseline expectation that it will qualify for the NCAA Tournament.
The seeds of rebirth and decline
It’s tempting to picture the Big 5’s history as an unbroken string of unforgettable nights at the Palestra, great teams playing great games inside a gym packed to its uppermost corners with 9,000 people, give or take a few rascals who managed to sneak in for free. There were hundreds of such nights, to be sure. But it’s striking to put that past into a wider context and see how much certain changes and trends fostered and then jeopardized everything that made the Big 5 wonderful and unique.
Those fond memories often gloss over a relatively fallow period for the Big 5 during the 1970s. Villanova had three consecutive losing seasons from 1972 to 1975. Temple went 16-37 over the ’74-75 and ’75-76 seasons and qualified for the NCAA Tournament once in an 11-year span from 1972 to 1983. St. Joe’s went 8-17 in ’74-75, the first of six straight seasons in which the Hawks missed the NCAAs. Penn was the exception, and La Salle held its own, but a Daily News back-page photo captured the overall listlessness perfectly: Harry “Yo-Yo” Shiffern, the lovable vagrant who was the city series’ unofficial mascot, fast asleep during a Palestra doubleheader.
The Big 5 was in a collective funk, and it took a few pivotal developments to snap it back to prominence and position it to flourish further.
Lionel Simmons (center) is the Big 5’s all-time leading scorer and fifth in NCAA history with 3,217 career points.
College basketball’s landscape was flatter then. The NCAA Tournament went to 32 participants in 1975 and to 40 in 1979, and many of the qualifying programs were mid-majors. During the ’70s, each of these teams reached the Final Four: Jacksonville, St. Bonaventure, New Mexico State, Western Kentucky, Marquette, UNC Charlotte — and, in ’79, Penn. The Quakers upset North Carolina, Syracuse, and St. John’s before Magic Johnson and Michigan State pulverized them in the national semis. But their run was the most improbable of the decade, and their timing was impeccable.
The following season, after a star turn at the Pan-American Games in Puerto Rico, La Salle’s Michael Brooks was named the Kodak National Player of the Year. As terrific as Brooks’ senior campaign was — he averaged more than 24 points and 11 rebounds, scoring 51 points in a triple-overtime loss at BYU — his candidacy for the honor was buoyed by Indiana’s Bob Knight, who had coached him at the Pan-Am Games and touted him to reporters.
“If I were allowed to start my own team tomorrow,” Knight said in January 1980, “the first person I would pick would be Michael Brooks.”
Such praise from the best, the most famous, and the most temperamental coach in the country carried weight, and Knight’s words elevated the reputations of both Brooks and Philadelphia basketball. That ascendance continued in March 1981, when St. Joe’s, under Jim Lynam, won the East Coast Conference tournament, knocked off top-ranked DePaul in the second round of the NCAAs, and advanced to the regional final before losing to the eventual national champs: Knight, Isiah Thomas, and the Hoosiers.
Fran Dunphy coached more than 1,000 games as a Division I head coach.Villanova coach Rollie Massimino gathers in Center City with players Ed Pinckney, Wyatt Maker, Chuck Everson, Dwight Wilbur, Veltra Dawson, and Brian Harrington in 1985 after winning the national title.
So the Big 5 was on its way back, regaining relevance among casual college hoops fans and among the sport’s cognoscenti. The two most significant factors in its renaissance, though, happened off the court. In March 1980, Villanova left the Eastern Eight and jumped to the Big East. And in August 1982, Temple hired John Chaney as its head coach.
Those moves and the rewards they wrought thrust those two programs, and in turn the entire Big 5, into a higher realm. Villanova won the national championship in 1985 — an underdog triumphant, a marvelous story enhanced by the Wildcats’ status as a program in a major conference in a sport whose vast national reach was still expanding: Magic vs. Larry Bird in ’79, North Carolina State surviving and advancing in ’83, Dick Vitale, CBS, ESPN, Big Monday, Selection Sunday, March Madness consuming a month’s worth of America’s attention.
Chaney was this wild-eyed, lesson-teaching, justice-preaching wizard, confounding opponents with his matchup-zone defense, crafting the hardest schedule in the nation every year to battle-test his teams, leading the Owls to a No. 1 ranking in 1988 and three Elite Eight appearances in a six-year span.
Fran Dunphy led Penn to a 69-14 record and three NCAA Tournament appearances from 1992 to 1995.
Nestled in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) with schools of similar profiles, La Salle went to the NCAA Tournament four times and the NIT twice in Speedy Morris’s first six years as head coach and had another national player of the year: Lionel Simmons. From 1992 to 1995, Penn dominated the Ivy League under Fran Dunphy: a 69-14 record, three NCAA Tournament appearances and a first-round victory over Nebraska, Jerome Allen and Matt Maloney forming one of the best backcourts in the country. St. Joe’s went 26-7 and advanced to the Sweet 16 in 1996-97, the season that introduced that notorious wallflower Phil Martelli to the rest of the country.
Former Temple coach John Chaney with players Lynn Greer and Quincy Wadley.
Hard circumstances and poor decisions
The factors that damaged the Big 5 were legion. Some applied to just one or two programs. Some applied to all of them. Some were mistakes, bad choices. Some were unavoidable and beyond the programs’ control.
Start with La Salle. Given an opportunity in 1990 to build an 8,000-seat on-campus basketball arena — Tom Gola offered to raise the funding for it — the university said no. Then its leadership made what is commonly considered the disastrous decision to relocate from the MAAC to the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. The program has never recovered.
Look at Temple. Chaney, a singular presence and attraction, retired in 2006. Though Dunphy, his successor, guided the Owls to six consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, the university’s quest for football dollars led it to leave the Atlantic 10 for the American Athletic Conference — and abandon its basketball-first identity.
Again: individual schools, individual issues. But those problems were byproducts of college basketball’s overall reshaping during the 1980s and ’90s. In retrospect, the most infamous moment in Big 5 history — the dissolution of the round-robin, at the insistence of Villanova and coach Rollie Massimino, after the 1990-91 season — was an acknowledgment of those changes, and the attempts to preserve the Big 5 as it had always been would inevitably fail.
Phil Martelli led St. Joe’s to go 26-7 and advanced to the Sweet 16 in 1996-97.Former Villanova coach Steve Lappas jokes with the other Big 5 coaches during a taping of the Comcast basketball show in 1997.
When Villanova pushed to cut back on city series games and Temple pushed for more of those matchups to be played at campus sites other than the Palestra, they weren’t merely trying to make things easier for themselves. They were responding and reacting to college basketball’s new conditions for success.
Sneaker companies had begun financing all-star camps, AAU programs, and college programs. Now coaches didn’t have to rely on local high school teams to find players, and great Philly players were no longer making their names solely in the Public League, the Philadelphia Catholic League, or the Sonny Hill League. They were traveling to play AAU. They were seeing other cities, meeting other coaches. They weren’t as likely to stay home to play college ball.
“The most important recruiting device is recognition,” Chaney told author Bob Lyons in Palestra Pandemonium: A History of the Big Five, “and recognition comes from national TV. … They don’t know what the Big 5 is outside of this area. They knew who Villanova was when they won the national championship, so you could always attach yourself to them. But it wasn’t going to get you very far because no one knew the history and tradition of the Big 5.”
In that way and others, the inherent parochialism of the Big 5 worked against it. For instance, Dave Gavitt, the founding commissioner of the Big East, struck a deal in 1980 with ESPN, then a fledgling sports network hungry for programming, for the exclusive rights to televise the conference’s games. That arrangement made it difficult, if not impossible, for Villanova and any other Big East school to be involved in a 7 p.m./9 p.m. Palestra doubleheader and for a national television audience to watch that doubleheader.
“We needed the game between Villanova and Georgetown at 8 p.m. to go on our network,” Gavitt told Lyons. “We couldn’t clear games at 7 p.m. because of the game shows that all the local stations carried.”
Jalen Brunson and former Villanova coach Jay Wright at the Finneran Pavilion on Feb. 8, 2023.
As it was, the Big 5 had a TV deal of its own, with the Philly-based premium cable channel PRISM, starting in 1978. Yet the PRISM commitment actually limited the exposure of some of the Big 5’s schools.
During the 1989-90 season, as one example, the Atlantic 10 wanted to place a Temple-La Salle game on ESPN so that it would be telecast nationally. “ESPN,” Lyons wrote, “subsequently refused to carry it, however, because it did not want to black it out in PRISM’s trading area.”
So hoops fans in the Delaware Valley could watch the game at home, but no one else could. At a time when college basketball was becoming more accessible, the Big 5 was cutting itself off from everyone who wasn’t already familiar with it.
That history might seem ancient. It’s not. Wright’s tenure and the economics of the sport have placed Villanova on a separate tier from the other programs. And now that he, Chaney, Dunphy, Martelli, and Morris — the local legends who were the backbone of the Big 5 — aren’t coaching anymore, the remaining infrastructure hasn’t been strong enough to restore the teams to excellence and maintain the intensity of the rivalries.
It’s a shame, but it was only a matter of time. Yes, the Big 5 was a Philly thing. Yes, it was a national thing. Yes, it was a glorious thing. And now it’s gone, and all the wistfulness and wishful thinking in the world won’t change the hard and inescapable truth: That glory isn’t coming back.
Bob Nark made certain to go to Mass on Saturday night. That way, he would be free Sunday morning to turn on his television to NBC, to United States vs. Canada in Milan, to an unforgettable hockey game with an unforgettable finish, to a celebration that moved him and hundreds more people throughout South Jersey to tears.
Nark taught chemistry at Gloucester Catholic High School for 48 years, and one of those years, he happened to have Johnny Gaudreau in class. Before Gaudreau was a seven-time All-Star with the Calgary Flames and Columbus Blue Jackets, before he won a national championship at Boston College, while he was forging his legend as the star of stars within the South Jersey hockey community, he was to Nark just a conscientious student who would raise his hand to answer a question when no one would. “Besides being a great hockey player,” Nark, whose son Jason is an Inquirer staff writer, said by phone Sunday afternoon, “he was a great kid. I loved him.”
So Nark made certain to watch not just the United States’ thrilling 2-1 victory but its emotional aftermath. Jack Hughes scored 101 seconds into overtime. The Americans won their first gold medal since the “Miracle on Ice” 46 years ago. And now three players — Auston Matthews, Zach Werenski, and Matthew Tkachuk — had lifted a Team USA jersey over their heads and were carrying it around the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena like a flag.
U.S. star Matthew Tkachuk carries Noa Gaudreau, the daughter of the late Johnny Gaudreau, on the ice after the gold medal win.
A Gaudreau jersey, with his No. 13 on the back, for the teammate who would have been, for the friend they had lost in August 2024, when an allegedly drunken driver struck and killed Johnny, 31, and his brother, Matt, 29 — on the night before their sister, Katie, was to be married — as they rode bicycles along County Route 551.
“I was so proud they remembered him for how great he was,” Nark said. “Today brought back a lot of memories, seeing them march his jersey around the ice.”
That entire postgame sequence — from the players’ gesture with the jersey to their scurrying into the stands to make sure Johnny’s two eldest children, 3-year-old Noa and 2-year-old Johnny Jr., joined them for the team picture — sent a quiver across a region that the Gaudreau family turned into a hockey hotbed years ago. Guy Gaudreau, Johnny’s father, had helped to form the program at Gloucester Catholic, forging it into a powerhouse before Matt eventually coached there, too. All the while, Johnny was the example that every youth coach could hold up to every youngster who was wobbling on skates but dreaming big dreams.
“Just an inspiration,” former Gloucester Catholic coach Tom Bunting once said. “As a parent, you could tell your players or your kid, ‘Hey, anything’s possible.’”
The days and weeks immediately after Johnny and Matt’s deaths had been nothing but a trauma for the entire community, a collective mourning that still hasn’t ended. “You never get past something like that,” said Tom Iacovone, Gloucester Catholic’s principal. “Johnny’s and Matt’s impact on us, it’ll never leave.” The challenge since has been to embrace what Ed Beckett, one of Iacavone’s predecessors as principal, called “the deeper Catholic tradition of remembrance, of the living memory of those who have gone before us.”
Jane and Guy Gaudreau, the parents of the late Matthew and Johnny Gaudreau, at the U.S. team’s semifinal against Slovakia on Friday.
So there are a golf tournament and fundraisers. There are photos and hockey sweaters hanging on the walls inside Hollydell Ice Arena in Sewell, where the brothers played and coached. And on Sunday, in a city more than 4,000 miles away, across an ocean, there was a moment when Johnny Gaudreau’s jersey and spirit were there for the world to see, a moment that choked the breath of everyone who knew and loved him.
He never had the chance to compete for Team USA on this stage. These Olympics were the first since the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, to include NHL players. But with his family in the arena for the gold-medal game, with the United States’ players clearly keeping him at the front of their minds and the bottom of their hearts, with so many joyous and tender phone calls and text messages traveling among those connected to Gloucester Catholic and South Jersey hockey, Johnny Gaudreau was as alive Sunday as he has ever been since that dark night on County Route 551. After the game, Tom Iacovone took a picture of his daughter, Nora, who is 7 years old. She was wearing a Team USA scarf with the No. 13 on it. He texted the photo to Katie Gaudreau. A great and unforgettable day to remember a great and unforgettable kid, gone too soon.
Julius Erving will celebrate his 76th birthday on Sunday, just a few weeks after the 50th anniversary of the event that led to his milestone signing by the 76ers: the American Basketball Association’s Slam Dunk Contest. Erving’s victory in the five-man competition — held in Denver on Jan. 27, 1976, during the ABA’s final season, while he was starring for the New York Nets — marked his breakthrough into America’s sports and pop-culture consciousness.
In this excerpt from his book “Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk,” Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski details why the contest was so significant to Erving, to the Sixers, and to the evolution of professional basketball.
Julius “Dr. J” Erving celebrated his 76th birthday this week.
The people in charge of the ABA were under no illusions about the condition of their league as it entered its ninth season. Despite its star power — Connie Hawkins, George McGinnis, Erving, more — franchises were folding, or relocating then folding, every year. Two, the San Diego Sails and Utah Stars, went under during that 1975-76 season. Rather than committing to keep the league afloat, its top-drawing teams — the Nets, with Erving, and the Denver Nuggets, with their sky-walking star, David Thompson — were eyeballing the NBA, looking to bolt to a stabler, more lucrative situation.
To juice interest, and with less to lose with each passing day, the league’s decision-makers tried a new format for its midseason All-Star Game at McNichols Arena: The Nuggets, as the defending champions and the game’s hosts, would take on a squad of players picked from the ABA’s other six teams. That wasn’t all. The country-western singers Glen Campbell and Charlie Rich would perform before the game, and, at the suggestion of Jim Bukata, the league’s public-relations director, there would be a slam-dunk contest at halftime.
Five players, all of whom would already be in Denver for the game, would take part: Erving, Thompson, George Gervin, Artis Gilmore, and Larry Kenon. Including a non-All-Star in the contest would have required flying in a non-All-Star for the contest, and no one in the league was about to spend that extra money. Erving asked Kevin Loughery, the Nets’ head coach, if the contest ought to have a white participant, and in fact, the league invited the Nuggets’ Bobby Jones to compete. Jones declined. “I wanted to win the All-Star Game,” he told me. “I didn’t have the energy to do what those guys did.”
On Jan. 27, 1976, with 17,798 — the largest crowd in ABA history — on hand, with $1,200 in prize money at stake, the five competitors were briefed on the rules before commencing with the contest. Each of them could attempt up to five dunks in a two-minute span. One of the dunks had to be from a stationary position; one had to have the player start his move from the foul line, 10 feet away, or beyond. Two contestants would dunk on one basket and three would dunk on the other, the public-address announcer told everyone, “to take pressure off the rims and backboards.”
Based on “artistic ability, imagination, body flow, and fan response,” four judges would determine the winner. The panel: former Knicks star and Nuggets general manager Vince Boryla; Nuggets super-fan Alberta Worthington; high school standout LaVon Williams, who was “Mr. Basketball” in Colorado before heading off to the University of Kentucky; and Barry Fey, a former guard at Penn who, as a concert promoter, had set up the pregame festivities with Campbell and Rich.
Gilmore, the tallest competitor at 7-foot-2, appeared unsure of what to do, as if he hadn’t practiced or planned his dunks or was, for whatever reason, holding back. Gervin and Kenon were a little looser, but there was a mood of tentativeness in the arena until Thompson got the ball.
Fresh from a remarkable career at North Carolina State and in his rookie season with the Nuggets, he had been nervous throughout the days leading into the contest, so eager was he to live up to the home crowd’s expectations and hopes. His teammates had been pumping him up, encouraging him, letting him know which of his dunks they thought were his best. From the right side, he charged toward the hoop and hammered down a powerful right-handed slam. Working quickly, he ripped off a double-pump two-handed reverse and, from the left baseline, a 360-degree spin and jam, establishing himself as the man to beat.
But now, it was Erving’s turn. Standing directly under the basket, he dunked two balls at once — a nod, perhaps unconsciously, to his days at Roosevelt High School on Long Island, when he pulled off the trick as a teenager. Then he walked out to halfcourt, then back to the free-throw line, then back to the opposite free-throw line, counting and measuring his steps as he went.
Before the contest, he had made a $1,500 bet with Doug Moe, then an assistant coach with the Nuggets, that he could take off from the foul line and dunk during his descent. He paused, bent at the waist, then started, a slight stutter step, then a sprint into four floor-eating strides from the midcourt stripe to just inside the foul line, then … whoosh. Up.
“I’ve described Julius as more of a glider than a jumper,” Jones told me. “He was more of a long jumper.”
New York Nets forward Julius Erving, left, raises his arms as he is hugged by a teammate following the Nets victory over the Denver Nuggets at the Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, N.Y., on May 7, 1976.
The crowd let out a communal Whoa. Erving lost the bet to Moe, but he didn’t need another dunk to win the contest. After a reverse from the right side, he swooped in from the left side, grabbing the rim with his left hand and windmilling the ball through the hoop with his right, then finishing with an “Iron Cross” dunk from the right baseline, spreading his arms and dunking the ball without looking at the basket. All the game’s players greeted him at halfcourt to congratulate him. The judges’ decision was a formality.
“It was something else,” Erving told me. “It’s still talked about today. I didn’t know it would have such a lasting effect on basketball history, and neither did any of the other players. I don’t think any of us really knew. We were the ABA, and we were crowd-pleasers. Yes, we made history, but the intention wasn’t making history.”
The All-Star Game — and, in turn, the dunk contest — was supposed to have been broadcast nationally but ended up being televised in just five markets: Denver, Indianapolis, Louisville, San Antonio, and St. Louis. Since the game didn’t end until after 2 a.m. Eastern time, the ripples from the contest didn’t start spreading immediately. Only after Good Morning, America and The Today Show featured Erving and Thompson did the magnitude of the event begin to reveal itself.
“Merger plans had long been in the works between the ABA and the NBA,” ESPN’s Eric Neel once wrote, “but the contest no doubt hastened them.”
Afterward, Erving said that he was unlikely to compete in another dunk contest ever again, that his knees were “75 percent of what they used to be.” (He did, in fact, compete in another: the NBA’s 1984 contest, where he finished second to the Phoenix Suns’ Larry Nance.) But he and the ABA had already ignited, or at least accelerated, an insurrection within pro basketball. The slam dunk was cool, and the ABA had embraced it, which made the ABA cool, which made the NBA seem stuffy and stiff in comparison, mostly because it didn’t have the athlete who, more than anyone, had made the slam dunk cool.
Julius Erving of the New York Nets, known as “Dr J,” scores during an ABA game at Nassau Coliseum, in Uniondale, N.Y., on Nov. 29, 1975.
In Philadelphia, 76ers general manager Pat Williams had watched those TV highlights of the contest.
“That,” he told me, “is what really put Julius on the stage.”
Erving never missed a game during his three-year career with the Nets, leading them to the league championship in 1974 and 1976, and was at times seemingly too good to be true. Long before San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich figured out that he could scream at his franchise centerpiece, Tim Duncan, and that Duncan would take the criticism without complaint, and that the other, lesser players would understand Popovich gave the team’s superstar no special dispensation, Kevin Loughery used the same psychological tactic with Erving. Doc messed up, even when he didn’t. Doc was no different, even if he was.
One night, Erving dunked over three defenders, and Loughery called a timeout for no reason other than to pull Erving aside and tell him, You just played the greatest three-minute stretch of basketball I’ve ever watched. Rod Thorn, an assistant under Loughery, had never seen a player catch and dunk an alley-oop pass with one hand until he saw Erving do it. The shame was that his exploits took place so often under the blanket of the ABA’s obscurity.
In Game 6 of the ‘76 ABA Finals, Erving scored 31 points, pulled down 19 rebounds, and blocked four shots as the Nets rallied from a 22-point deficit in the third quarter to beat the Denver Nuggets, 112-106, and win the series in six games. As they stormed the Nassau Coliseum court, Nets fans nearly trampled Nuggets’ play-by-play voice Al Albert, who climbed atop a table to escape. Albert lost his microphone and headset. The phone and cable lines he needed for his broadcast were cut. His television monitor crashed to the floor.
The chaotic scene was a bittersweet valedictory for The Doctor’s tenure: The passion and adoration that he would earn over his career in the NBA, with the Sixers, would manifest itself in that final game … and never again with the Nets. Attendance was low throughout the ABA. So was revenue. The franchises were too regional. The league was falling apart.
“Everybody thought we were in the hinterlands,” Bill Melchionni, a member of that ‘75-75 Nets team, told me. “We were minor-league.”
Four ABA teams merged with the NBA in June 1976. “I can say without a doubt,” broadcaster John Sterling, who was the Nets’ radio play-by-play voice at the time, once said, “that what finally convinced the NBA to merge was a chance to get Julius in the league.” Melchionni, who had become the Nets’ general manager immediately after that championship series, began fielding phone calls from civic leaders and chambers of commerce around the country, begging to have Erving and the Nets come to their cities to play exhibition games, offering as much as $50,000 as enticement.
“We were scheduled to play two games in Vegas,” Melchionni told me. “Guys would ask, ‘How many minutes is he going to play?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s an exhibition game. He’s not going to play 48 minutes.’”
The calls stopped, of course, after Wednesday, Oct. 20, 1976. The last day that Julius Erving belonged to the ABA. The first day that the NBA belonged to Julius Erving.
Inside a half-empty John E. Glaser Arena on La Salle’s campus Tuesday night, Robert Moore lounged at the end of the Constitution boys’ basketball team’s bench, head back, arms folded, legs crossed, as if he had resigned himself to being powerless to stop the blowout before him. He wasn’t. He could have. He hadn’t.
The second game of the Public League semifinals was a rout from the start, a 73-41 Imhotep Charter victory that was never close, was never in doubt, and never should have been played. Constitution was there only because its previous opponent, Carver Engineering & Science, had been forced to forfeit their quarterfinal matchup when an altercation marred the game’s final minutes. With his team down by 12 points, with 71 seconds left in regulation, a Constitution player had shoved an E&S player, sparking an on-court confrontation among athletes, coaches, and fans. E&S’s bench had emptied, which, according to Public League rules, disqualified E&S from the tournament, allowing Constitution to move on to face Imhotep.
From that ugly set of circumstances, Moore, his team, and Constitution’s administration received a gift that they never should have accepted. Constitution was on its way to losing in the quarterfinals until one of its players committed the act that ignited the chaos. And even if the Public League was following the letter of the law by confirming that E&S had to forfeit — “Constitution did the right thing,” league president Jimmy Lynch said, “by not entering the floor during the incident” — Moore and Constitution still could have done the honorable thing and declined to play in the semis, too.
It would have sent a powerful message to Constitution’s players, and to the league as a whole, that certain principles are more important than playing a game. It would have turned this fiasco into a teachable moment, a cautionary tale that Constitution’s kids hadn’t earned the right to compete against Imhotep, against the Public League’s dominant program. It would have been a better resolution than the scene Tuesday night at La Salle, where security and city police officers stood poised at the corners of the court and the public-address announcer admonished spectators to stay off the floor and let the referees do their jobs.
“We didn’t feel like it would be a great look for the league,” Moore said, “not having a team here to play in a semifinal game, [having] rented out an arena.”
Sorry, it would have been an admirable stand for the Public League and its leaders to take. And while Moore deserves credit for facing some questions about the incident and Constitution’s and the league’s courses of action, his explanations sounded more like excuses for the failure to make the difficult but correct decision here. The price of renting Glaser, for instance, was already a sunk cost. That money was gone one way or another, so why not use that second semifinal game as a stage to show everyone what class and responsibility look like?
“It’s really an administrative thing,” Moore said. “Honestly, after reviewing everything, we felt like the people who needed to be suspended were suspended.”
Imhotep defeated Constitution, 73-41, in the Public League boys’ basketball semifinal on Tuesday.
Yes, the Public League suspended two Constitution players for their roles in the melee, but that was the minimum discipline for an embarrassing situation that those young athletes had created and escalated. The incident happened last Thursday. By Friday afternoon, someone from Constitution, from the Public League, from District 12, or from the PIAA should have been on the phone, arranging a meeting, getting the right people in the same room or on a Zoom call to settle on a solution that didn’t let Constitution benefit from its own mistakes.
Instead, Moore called coaches around the league, starting with Imhotep’s Andre Noble: “I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I want to play a game. … I kind of left it up to the kids as well.” Except this wasn’t Noble’s call to make, and it certainly wasn’t the kids’. Of course an opposing coach wouldn’t want an important postseason game canceled. Of course teenagers would want such an incident to be wiped away with few consequences. And of course, E&S’s parents and players have been lobbying for absolution and justice for themselves, as if anyone comes out of a mess like this with clean hands.
“To be fair, we’ve tried to take the high road, but we felt like we’ve been basically scapegoated as we were in the wrong with everything that happened,” Moore said. “In actuality, with all the facts the district had to deal with, it just wasn’t the case. …
“There were a lot of moving parts, and we evaluated everything when we looked at it. Obviously the district and the PIAA had all of this information, so what you’re getting is — and I completely understand — parents who are unhappy about the situation. I completely understand that.
“I’m a coach and an athletic director. I answer to a principal, who answers to an assistant superintendent. There are so many people above me.”
From Congress to college sports, through virtually every institution in American society, there’s a deep and desperate need for someone in a position of authority to be a genuine leader, to stand up and stand firm and say, This is who we’re expected to be. This is the right thing for those we’re supposed to serve. This is what we’re supposed to do, and this is how and why we’re going to do it. Yet here was another example where no one put the greater good and a larger lesson above appearances and self-interest. Here was another occasion where no one bothered to be an adult.
Moore and Constitution and the Public League had a chance, a real chance, to teach young people the value of accountability and the power of grace. They had an opportunity to be true educators, and they passed up that opportunity. They decided it was more important to play a game whose result was all but certain and would be quickly forgotten, and by the fourth quarter Tuesday night, Robert Moore was stretched out in his seat at the end of the bench, striking that posture that suggested he was content to have taken the easy way out. His team lost by 32 points. Hope it was worth it.
