2005 Basketball

2005 Basketball – Up Year for Downstate

By Chuck Durante

Is Middletown still downstate? If so, 2005 was an historic year in Delaware basketball. Downstate players comprised an unprecedented four-fifths of the year’s all-state boys team.

Thrice downstate schools had supplied three of the first five. It first happened in 1969, as something of a fluke. In 1976, Delaware’s three best players were from downstate. In 1999, four of the top six were from the Henlopen Conference. But this year, two players from Appoquinimink Hundred – Eric Boateng of St. Andrew’s and Mike Shipman of Middletown – joined Kyle White of Cape Henlopen and Josh Thornton of Caesar Rodney on an all-state team whose only Wilmington member was Tatnall’s first-ever first-team laureate, Jawan Carter – who lives in Chester.

That’s right. No upstate Blue Hen Conference players, indeed no upstate residents at all, on the top five.

Just a decade ago, demographers wondered if downstate baskets were mired in prolonged decline. Over the first six years of the 1990's, just three Henlopen players – Rodney Robinson, Lovett Purnell and Laron Profit – made first team. That each was named twice camouflaged the steepest decline in Kent-Sussex basketball fortunes since the 1960's. Final fours were contested without downstate flavor in 1992 and 1993, years when there was no serious Henlopen all-state candidate. The soybean days of 1975-1981, when Cape, Dover and Indian River supplied eight of 14 championship game participants, and about half of the best players, were distant dreams.

"Don’t worry," said Gerry Kobasa, when asked in 1993. "Things will change again." His school helped fuel the turnaround. By 1999, his ace, Brian Polk of Sussex Tech, was joined in the State’s first five by André Matthews of Seaford and Mike Stevenson of Lake Forest.

Janovar Weatherspoon of Caesar Rodney, first team a year earlier, headed the 1999 second team. Then, in 2003, Sussex Central, Sussex Tech and Dover made the final four.

Whether Middletown is still downstate is an open topic. Pratt’s Hatchery and Rutkoske’s Farm have given way to housing and strip shopping centers. Some brokers think Robin Williams was talking about subdividing farms when he said, "Carpe Diem" in Dead Poets Society, filmed in Middletown in 1989. Families incur long commutes so they can use Appoquinimink schools.

But Middletown is still where it is. Closer to Smyrna than Glasgow, it is surrounded by the region’s best farmland. Even growth-oriented partisans who have expanded town limits to permit development that would not be allowed under more restrictive county zoning laws want Middletown’s rural flavor to continue. Whether that is possible depends on lawmakers’ gumption, developers’ vision and public resolve, but that discussion is for another time.

Patterns are most significant when they are most unexpected.

! Few foresaw the dominance of Seaford in boys sports in the 1980's – before, during and after Delino.

! Who would have expected that the generation that rebelled so thoroughly against parental control would itself give rise to the overbearing forms of parenthood that now poison – ask any referee or coach – scholastic sports?

! The minions who eliminated indoor track in the New Castle County School District – the short-lived behemoth that controlled 12 upstate public schools in the early 1980's – could never foresee the sport’s boom that now teems every winter Saturday at the Walter S. Carpenter Field House on Rising Sun Lane.

Since Devin Smith graduated four years ago from the William Penn powerhouse he helped to four state championship games, only one first-team all-state player, Marc Egerson of Glasgow, and four second team players have come from upstate "boundaried" schools. (This adjective, for public schools which, unlike vo-tech schools, have attendance borders, was coined in 1977 by Archie Rapposelli, Claymont coach, school board member and advocate who died in early June.) Those same schools annually produced half or more of the State’s top ten players before 1995.

Past performance is no indication of future results, but the same questions that were asked about downstate public schools in 1993 are being asked of Wilmington and Newark schools now.

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The best player doesn’t necessarily play for the best team.

Although Brian Polk was runaway choice as player of the year in 2000, his team barely made the quarterfinals, where it was eliminated. Terence Stansbury was the best player of 1980, but Newark didn’t make the state tournament. A player of the year was not selected before the mid-1970's, but one could argue that in three straight years – Archmere’s Fran Korwek in 1969, Concord’s Jeff McConnell in 1970 and Christiana’s Freeman Williams in 1971 – the state’s best player didn’t play past the first round.

This year, St. Andrew’s only got to the round of 16, but Eric Boateng was titanic.

The Cardinals arranged their strongest schedule ever – Middletown, Caravel, Salesianum, and a team probably better than any of them, Frankford, second in Philadelphia’s Public League. After mid-season, the Saints played short-handed. Boateng was equal to the task. In the first round of the state tournament, he surmounted Concord’s double-teaming to score 38, with 18 rebounds and 8 blocked shots. The performance replicated what Boateng did before afternoon crowds all year.

St. Andrew’s has had a noble sports history – Delaware’s girls lacrosse powerhouse, with state titles in boys soccer in 1981, wrestling in 1976 and boys lacrosse in 2004, four decades of excellence in baseball, many tennis champions, football stars, national rankings and Henley appearances in crew, even a cross country champion who ran at Villanova – but Boateng is the Cardinals’ initial first-team basketball player. Sheldon Parker may have been the most accomplished member of the state’s class of 1971 – he went on to start two years for Davidson – but only made second team. Sulaiman Jenkins made a big splash in Philadelphia – 35 points against a Friends Central team with a young player named Hakim Warrick, including 8 points in the last minute to tie the game – but for Delaware voters, it was a tree falling inaudibly in an uninhabited forest, and he made third team in 1999.

The only question is whether Boateng, a Briton from London now readying for his freshman year at Duke, is the state’s best big man ever. Other candidates include Sherman Dillard of De La Warr, thought by many the state’s best player of the 1960's, the only Delaware native ever drafted by the 76ers; Ron Johnson of Wilmington, who led North Carolina A&T to the NIT; and Will Sheridan Jr. of Sanford and Villanova. (The next time you’re tempted to pay attention to the chat rooms, consider the 2003 posts claiming that Sheridan plays "soft," a fascinating scouting report on someone who averages 9 points and 5 fouls per 40 minutes of Big East play.)

Delaware’s high school coaches picked Boateng over Carter and Shipman as the state’s best player in the poll conducted by the Delaware Sportswriters and Broadcasters Association. Under the process used for several decades, all coaches were invited to list first, second, third teams and honorable mentions. Crucially, they also rank the top six players in order, and identify the teams they saw. The process eliminates boxscore ballots and almost always yields a consensus. 80 percent of coaches vote. Only once – in 1990, when Erik Edwards and Devon Chambers polled so evenly that the DSBA called it a jump ball – has the player of the year not been obvious from the coaches’ voting.

When the selection was first conducted this way, in 1988, the polling yielded a clump of three guards, Kevin Booth of Salesianum, J. J. Taylor of Claymont (there used to be a ball club there) and Mike Neill of Seaford, only two of whom could fit onto a first team with Brandywine’s Dexter Boney, Sussex Central’s Robert Ruffin and Delcastle’s Anthony Wright. A rock-paper-scissors comparison of the coaches’ preferences among the three – where the top-six rankings proved crucial – put Neill on the second team.

After the coaches’ banquet at the Air Base Officers Club, I privately told Mike how close he came. He answered, "That’s OK. Kevin had a better year than I did."

That attitude is a reason why Mike Neill became Big East baseball player of the year, a batting champ and all-star in the high minors, a major leaguer before injury, an Olympic champion and a member of the newest class in the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame.

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