Greetings from a sunny, not-too-cold Franklin Field. I'm here to cover the Penn-Cornell football game for the Inquirer. Later this afternoon I'll head next door to the Palestra to cover the Penn-Howard basketball game, also for the paper.
To be honest, I'd rather be out on the Main Line for the Villanova-Delaware showdown. I wanted to see Omar Cuff, the Blue Hens' stud running back, in person. And I'd really like to be at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Conn., where a sellout crowd of more than 60,000 is watching Harvard and Yale play for the Ivy League title as I write this.
Both clashes are among Mike Jensen's Games of the Week for good reason.
The rest of this post, though, is going to be about basketball. Unfortunately, I don't have anything insightful to say about Temple's shocking 25-point collapse yesterday to the College of Charleston because I'm still stunned myself, so I'll leave it to Mike Jensen and Mike Kern to break it down from San Juan.
But the game I'm covering this afternoon has a nice little storyline to it. Howard coach Gil Jackson spent 16 years as an assistant coach to Fran Dunphy at Penn before leaving for Washington in 2005.
Today, he makes his first trip as a head coach to the arena he called home for a very long time, facing his old team in a preliminary round game of the Philly Classic.
I talked to Jackson on Thursday, and yes, I started with the rather obvious question of what it would be like to come out of the visitors' locker room for once.
It turns out he's done that quite a few times before.
"I used to go in there at around 4 o'clock and get dressed in the visitor’s locker room, so I’m familiar with that," he said, "but it will be strange talking to a team there, getting a team ready to take the floor from that side of the court. That’ll be a little strange, and sitting on that side of the bench, and the Red and Blue Crew being against you and not for you."
But Jackson won't be the only person on the Bison bench familiar with the surroundings today. You might remember a former Drexel guard named Randy Hampton. He's playing in the Washington neighborhood known as Shaw now, and Jackson is very happy to have him.
"He’s very athletic but he’s only 6-[foot]-4 -- he’s a slashing time player, strong, can finish," Jackson said of Hampton. "He’s working to improve his outside shooting, and he’s a very good defender when he concentrates and a very good rebounder because of his athleticism."
Hampton is also a D.C. native, and while at Dunbar High School he was the DCIAA (their public league) player of the year. He was a Washington Post first-team All-Met player that year as well, and take a look at who else was on that team: Jeff Green, Dwayne Anderson and Abdulai Jalloh among others, with Rudy Gay the Player of the Year.
Between that and the fact that Hampton's mother works at Howard, it didn't come as too much of a surprise when Jackson noted that "sometimes when my wife and I walk around Washington with some Howard gear on, people say, 'Oh, you have Randy Hampton playing for you.' "
Well, it did surprise me in one respect. Find out about it after the jump.
Those of you who listened to the Philliescast over the summer might remember that on one of the last episodes, I admitted that I grew up in D.C. So I've been following Howard basketball for a very long time, and I've always been amazed that a school with such a famous reputation among historically black colleges has never been very good at basketball.
Jacskon is also well aware of that history.
"Because of the academic reputation, the kinds of people that are around – [Barack] Obama’s on campus, you may run into anybody on campus at any time," he said. "But the athletic part is very difficult because Howard has never really stressed athletics. So their infrastructure is tough -- the medical, the faciliaties, the interest from the student body."
Jackson compared his program to those at Hampton and Florida A&M, both of which have made names for themselves in basketball in recent years.
"Florida A&M is another nice school but they understand, they’re right there in Tallahassee with Florida State," he said. "So it’s always right there in their face what a big-time athletic operation should be."
But Jackson said things are slowly starting to change. There is a new student fan group, and he has taken to recruiting the kinds of players he went after at Penn -- those who were recruited by other Ivies, the Patriot League, and schools like Rice, Vanderbilt and William and Mary.
That philosophy got him Hampton and a player he recruited at Penn but didn't land, senior guard Jeron Smith, to transfer to Howard.
Smith's task today is another player Jackson recruited, Brian Grandieri.
"When we were recruiting [Grandieri], even though he was coming out of Malvern, Fran was always a little nervous," Jackson said. "He was like, ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’ and I said, ‘I think we’ve got to get this kid because he knows how to play, and he’ll find a way.’ "
The current Bison squad has three Philadephia-area natives on it: freshman guard Torrance Timothy (Yeadon, Pa./Penn Wood); sophomore center Nate Cooper (Camden, N.J.)/Leap Academy); and junior guard Eugene Myatt (Philadelphia/Lutheran Academy).
I suppose that in the end, none of this is of all that much importance to most of you. But if you come to the Philly Classic, don't be surprised to see a lot of people from around here rooting for Jackson. He made a lot of friends while in Philadelphia, and Howard's games up here are very important to him.
"It’s exciting going back to Penn, playing in the Palestra," he said. "Philadelphia is such a good basketball city, and they expect good basketball. That’s what I want to give them."
Comments (1)
Was Gilbert Jackson ever considered to succeeed Dunphy?
Is Penn really this bad?
Posted by Mickey | November 18, 2007 8:41 AM
Posted on November 18, 2007 08:41