Hoop expectations stay high for O’Hara, Bonner & Prendie
PHILADELPHIA » For the 10th time in his Cardinal O’Hara coaching career last February, Linus McGinty would plan to celebrate a Catholic League girls basketball championship. So after winning one more, he stopped at a restaurant with some friends and supporters, exhaled, and heard what he knew was coming next.
“Next year … No. 11,” is how he remembered the demand.
As he recalled, the friendly order was forwarded by the mother of Maura Hendrixson, then a junior for the Lions. And as he told the story, he smiled. “One night,” he said. “That was it.”
That’s how it works when traditions are rolling, and McGinty has had one rampaging for generations. The championships become expected, even when they are ever difficult to achieve. That pressure can be unreasonable. But it does carry a value.
McGinty and the Lions won another Catholic League championship Monday, No. 11 as requested, suppressing Neumann-Goretti, 54-39. History will make it look like a standard, 15-point high school basketball victory. Lost in that shorthand will be that the Lions were behind by nine in the second half. Further buried will be what they were thinking.
“We didn’t panic,” McGinty said.
That was a tribute to the players, their precision, their foul-shooting, their teamwork. That was a reflection of McGinty, who was winning championships before some of his players were born. But it was also the result of expectation, the kind Mackenzie Gardler understood every time in the past four years she wore a uniform with “O’Hara” stitched across the front.
“Definitely,” said the senior guard, who scored 17 points, nine from the foul line, plenty when it mattered. “There is a lot of legacy that comes to O’Hara. And to represent that legacy and carry it on is huge. And to do it with your best friends, back to back, is a big deal.”
O’Hara has won the Catholic League in all of its everchanging forms, rarely missing multiple enrollment cycles without some players taking scissors to Palestra nets. It’s the kind of energy every program seeks or, in some cases, seeks to regain.
Jack Concannon is the boys coach at Bonner & Prendergast, or, as the many shirts in the stands read Monday, Bonner. He played for the Friars in 1983, winning a Catholic League championship, and proudly watched his alma mater win again in 1984 and 1988, continuing a tradition of Bonner Catholic League championships that began in 1960.
Concannon never forgets that, not during any practice, not during any game, and certainly not in the runup to the Catholic League final Monday.
“We haven’t done anything yet,” Concannon proclaimed after a semifinal victory over Archbishop Carroll. “Like I told the kids after the game, ‘Forget it. It’s fun. Enjoy it for an hour. But Monday is the only game that matters.’”
The game, the second in a Palestra doubleheader, would result in a Delaware County split, Roman Catholic edging the Friars, 51-49, on late layup. Concannon wanted Bonner’s fifth Catholic League championship for all of his players. But he wanted it just as much for the alumni who’d remembered when a Friars championship was not so rare.
“There are a lot of people who care about Bonner basketball, people who played back in the early ’60s, the ’70s, some guys that never got a chance to play in this game,” Concannon said. “So I tell them, ‘We’re not playing just for ourselves, we are playing for the entire Bonner community.’”
That community had to be entertained by a final game loaded with leadchanges and momentum swings. And for a school that as recently as 2012 was about to close, it was another sign of revival. The championships may or may not come. But if they do, it will be from the spin that has begun with a season that may yet end with a PIAA Class 5A championship.
“I hope so,” Concannon said. “A few years ago, we just wanted to get in the mix here. We did. Now the challenge is to try to get back here. It’s been a heck of a season. It’s not over yet.
“But we are trying to build a program. And we go from here. This is a big stage. But the young kids saw it and they know that we have to work hard to get back here.”
With one senior in his mix this season, Concannon has a good chance to make a Palestra return next February. As for McGinty, he’s at the one-year-at-a-time point of his career and was unwilling Monday to commit to chasing Catholic League championship No. 12.
Either way, the momentum will not easily be stopped.
“I’m going to remember this night and last year forever,” Gardler said. “I told our freshman, Siobohan (Boylan), ‘You want to win a PCL championship, because it is the best time you will ever experience with the people you love and have been with since November.’
“Basketball is a long season. So you want to surround yourself with great people. And we definitely have great people on our team.”
There were great players all around the Palestra Monday.
For O’Hara, and for Bonner & Prendie too, it likely won’t be the last time.