More local talent finding homes at area programs
Between his junior and senior years at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Coraopolis, Cam Johnson grew 4 inches, sprouting from a 6foot-3 guard into a versatile 6-foot-7 forward with a smooth outside stroke and an ability to contend with taller players in the low post.
In that same time, he blossomed from an overlooked prospect into one who committed late in his senior year in 2014 to Pitt, the local power for which he grew up dreaming of joining.
Johnson’s case is fairly unusual, but in the context of local basketball recruits finding their way to one of the Pittsburgh area’s three Division I colleges, there’s a certain symbolism to his tale. After an extended stretch in which there was limited local flavor to the rosters at Duquesne, Robert Morris and, especially, Pitt, players from the WPIAL and City League have, quickly and virtually out of nowhere, started to make their mark at those schools.
At the beginning of the 2015-16 college basketball season, there were a combined six players among Pitt (Johnson, Sheldon Jeter and Ryan Luther), Robert Morris (Matty McConnell and Elijah Minnie) and Duquesne (Micah Mason) who graduated from WPIAL or City League schools, the most in more than a decade. Though that number is down to four for the upcoming 2016-17 campaign, the increased infusion of local talent in Pittsburgh college basketball paints a positive picture of
the sport’s place in the region.
“Everybody starts recruiting local; that’s where you cast your first net and you work out from there,” Robert Morris coach Andy Toole said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of people not identifying local talent. To me, there has been an increase in recruitable players and talent.”
Indeed, more area players have made it to the top level of college basketball in the past five years than there were in the five years before that. From 2012-16, 15 players from the WPIAL and City League went directly to Division I schools after they graduated high school, an increase from 2007-11 when 13 went. Furthermore, after no WPIAL or City League player went to a school in one of the nation’s top six conferences from 2008-11. Five have since 2012.
Three of those players ended up at Pitt, a program that previously hadn’t had more than one scholarship player from the WPIAL or City League on a team since the early 1990s.
Pittsburgh, of course, isn’t in the echelon it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was a city so fertile with recruits it sometimes sent as many as two dozen players to Division I schools. And while there are several local traveling teams featuring Division I prospects, the region is hurt in some respects by the lack of an AAU team sponsored by one of the major shoe companies, something that forces some top players to travel to Ohio to seek such opportunities.
“That just is what it is,” Duquesne coach Jim Ferry said. “Do I have the answer to it? No. What I do know is you’ve got a lot of kids spread out, playing on all different teams. Some play for different areas and in different states. They’ll figure it out. They’ll get it all together and if you get the better kids from the area all playing together, I think it would help out.”
When trying to foster young basketball talent, Pittsburgh has also had to grapple with its firmly-entrenched identity as a football town. The allure of, and sometimes pressure to play, football is very real for the area’s top athletes, causing many to ultimately choose that sport.
Pitt’s basketball success from 2001-11, a span in which the Panthers went 271-69, may have changed local athletes’ mentality a bit, but the uphill climb for basketball remains.
“We’re always looked at as a football city,” Johnson said. “Even kids growing up, you get athletes in the area who are pushed to football, who are told football is the main thing. You have basketball players around here who get a little overlooked.”
With the amount of local talent on Pitt, Duquesne and Robert Morris rosters in the past few years, though, there’s some kind of belief that while Pittsburgh might lag far behind other regions in churning out Division I players, it produces its share.
“If you look at some of the better Western PA teams, they’re starting to compete with some of the Eastern PA teams in the PIAA championships,” Toole said. “You’re going to see that continue to grow more and more. If you can just continue to find more players who are playing the game year-round and are dedicated to the game, there’s no reason that the talent pool around here can’t continue to grow and find success.”