Germantown Academy basketball coach Jim Fenerty. (Photo by Jonathan Vander Lugt)

by Jonathan Vander Lugt

About three-quarters of the way through just their first post-tryouts practice, long-time Germantown Academy coach Jim Fenerty dropped something new on his team.

He talked about his newly minted acronym, B.A.S.H., and told them, amidst some chuckles at its corniness, that they were going to be known as the “bash boys.”

It's not a derivative of the moniker bestowed upon the late-80s pair of Oakland Athletics Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco whose homerun hitting power earned them the moniker “bash brothers.” Instead, B.A.S.H. stands for the way he expects his Patriots to play.

“Ball pressure, anticipation, surprise, and hustle,” Fenerty explained. “It's basically man-to-man defense, but I just gave it a new name.”

Turns out that it's not a novel concept, but it resonated just the same. And that's what it's going to take if Germantown Academy hopes to leave the 2015-16 slate with an Inter-Ac crown.

“We're looking to get a four-peat this year, after winning the Inter-Ac three years in a row,” University of Pennsylvania-bound senior Devon Goodman said. “That's a really big goal for us — it's what we're working hard for.”

Yup, that's right. Germantown Academy has reigned supreme in the Inter-Academic League since the 2012-13 season.

“I love them,” Fenerty said of this team's five elder statesmen. “They've won three straight championships. When this year's seniors came in as freshmen, we had a great team. They played on JV and dressed varsity for a state championship team. The following year, we lost eight guys that played Division-I athletics.

“No one gave us a shot then, and then we won and did it the next year. We say our goal is simply to do the best we can every single day and get better.”

The Pats are hoping to do that by “beating teams up and down the floor,” Goodman said, “and beating them on the fast break.”

He gets it, because he knows that GA isn't blessed with the most size this year. They're not the biggest, but the Pats are a running team, full of kids that hope to tire out other teams with their relentlessness.

“We're just looking to be more aggressive,” Goodman said. “We're on the smaller side, as a team, so we're looking to be that dog-type team that gets on a defense and gets other teams to turn the ball over.”

According to Fenerty, it's an approach that, along with being the way he likes to run the program, is at least partially necessitated by the group of kids that he has each season.

“Each year it's a different team with different talents, so I felt like I had to come up with something different because if you stay the same, they get stale — and so do I,” Fenerty said. “I watch a lot of college practices — Villanova, St. Joe's, Lafayette, La Salle, Penn — and each time I go, people tell me that I've been coaching since Noah built the ark. But I think when you stop learning, it's time to stop coaching.”

So, with a new season comes a new flourish.

“Keeps their minds occupied,” Fenerty said. “These kids are really smart, so they'll analyze the whole thing and go with it. We've been playing man-to-man for almost my entire time here. Every once in a while, you give them a new twist.”

They'll need it, because, given the fact that they're a private school in the Philadelphia area, it's almost a given that their schedule is going to be brutal. They play a host of talented non-conference foes —Friends Central, St. Joe's Prep, and a number of teams that will be present at a high-level tournament in South Carolina in late December among them — before they really move into the meat of their conference slate.

“There's no playoffs in our league, so it's just 10 games,” Fenerty said. “It's a 10-round fight. You've just got to go out hope to get enough to win the league.”

To do that, they'll rely on leadership from the aforementioned core of seniors.

“We lost two very good leaders (last year), but they were smart enough to realize that they were going to graduate and that someone else would have to step up,” Fenerty said. “They drilled it into the heads of this year's seniors.”

“We've only practiced three days, but I'm thrilled,” he went on. “I just try to roll the ball out there and stay out of their way. I'm really pleased with what they're doing.”