PC's Adam Holland (Photo by Jonathan Vander Lugt)

by Jonathan Vander Lugt

Ever try to do a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit?

Maybe the long piece doesn’t interlock with the one you think it should, so you switch it out for the wide one. That works, but you then find out that the other pieces you had around that don’t work.

It’s frustrating, but you stick with it, because you know that when you have the whole picture together, it’ll be worth it.

That’s where Penn Charter head coach Jim Phillips is right now.

“The last two weeks, we’ve been playing very well,” Phillips said. “We’ve had very few lapses.”

PC’s 62-47 season-opening loss to the Episcopal Academy was a different story.

“When we talked about having a chance to win the league, these are the words we used: having a focused and disciplined effort,” Phillips said. “We need an approach to what we’re trying to do on a daily basis, 32 minutes at a time.”

“We have 320 minutes of play in the Inter-Ac,” he went on. “You would think that, at the very least, it would be easy to be focused and disciplined in the first 32.”

Needless to say, it was not. Down 19-6 with three minutes left in the second quarter, the Quakers scrapped together a run that sent them into the half down just 24-20.

“We get a lot of energy from seeing the ball go in the basket,” Phillips said. “Early on, that wasn’t happening—like the first 13 minutes of the game.”

It did, however, in the last three of the first half. It was the best stretch of basketball the Quakers played throughout the entire game. Junior Mason Williams was hitting his shots, freshman Ryan Holmes was chipping in and defensively, the Quakers played like they were on a mission.

Then the halftime bell rung and the tides turned again. It took Penn Charter more than three minutes to net their first points of the second half, and by then, Episcopal had built a 31-20 lead. Phillips called a timeout, but the damage was already done. PC treaded water to keep the deficit at 11 until the fourth quarter, but couldn’t get any closer.

Williams led the team with 13, and Holmes wound up with 10. Adam Holland, the team’s shifty point guard, finished with just six, and didn’t score until the third. He’s one of the pieces that’s going to have to find consistency—Holmes is just a freshman, and Williams can’t do all the work.

There’s time, though. It’s pointless to declare a season over after one rough game, and Phillips articulated as much.

“We had a collective hiccup that we hope to remedy Tuesday,” Phillips said. He went on to mention that last year, even after Penn Charter beat them in the league opener, Episcopal was in contention for the Inter-Ac title in the ninth game of the season.

The road isn’t closed for the Quakers—it’s just a little trickier to navigate, and they have less margin for error.

“Is there still an opportunity? Yeah,” Phillips said. “ It’s up to our leaders to right the ship.”

It’s also foolish to insinuate that the responsibility falls solely on the shoulders of the players. Good coaching is just as important, and Phillips realizes that there are some areas he can work on as well.

“I need to be more effective at communicating the exact, correct plan,” Phillips said. “Tonight, we didn’t execute the way we needed to.”

“We [as coaches] need to do a better job of communicating our expectations,” said Phillips.

So back to the earlier point: what’s leading to the Quakers’ woes? How do Phillips and the rest of his staff go about fixing them?

“There are little things that if you asked any team in the league if they wanted, then you’d say sure,” Phillips said. Those would be things like height, shooting, length—luxuries that any team would jump for at the chance.

“But is there enough talent on this team to compete for everyone in this league? Yeah,” Phillips went on.

That, like anything, will take time to figure out.

Jonathan Vander Lugt can be reached at vanderlugt.chlocal@gmail.com