Penn Charter's Mason Williams. (Photo by Jonathan Vander Lugt)

by Jonathan Vander Lugt

It was a brisk, sunny Saturday in East Falls.

Cristo Rey, the small, relatively new catholic school in north Philly traveled 10 minutes west into a completely different world - the sun-soaked, quiet, green campus of Penn Charter high school.

The game’s outcome was decided well before the halftime bell rang. By then, the Quakers were up 38-13. The final tally: 71-43.

The game mattered little in the grand scheme of the season. It was a weekend, nonconference game between a middling team in a small conference of schools not particularly known for its athletic talents and a team that, despite a rich history of athletic success, was going nowhere in what had become a lost season.

By this point, small victories are what pushes Penn Charter through.

“Little things that aren’t always in the box score are gradually getting better,” PC head coach Jim Phillips said. “Ryan Holmes is becoming more confident. He’s been getting into the lane and getting to the foul line more.”

On Saturday, he scored nine. The freshman represents much of the hope tied up what the future holds for Penn Charter basketball, and his growth has been important.

He’s hot and cold, though. For every breakaway play or drilled three-pointer, there’s a missed layup or turnover. Late in the first quarter, he cut through the lane, changed direction and hands as he went up for a layup—managing to get a decent look at the basket through all of this—but couldn’t quite finish.

It was a microcosm of not only his play, but Penn Charter’s season. The Quakers will play well for stretches, but fall asleep for others.

“We’re just not playing 32 minutes of every game,” Phillips said. “We’ll have stretches here go really well, stretches there go really well, but we’ll have a two or a four-minute lapse. I guess that’s got to fall on us as coaches.”

“We’re demonstrating that we have the ability, we’re just struggling to maintain it,” Phillips went on.

As of this writing, Penn Charter is 2-7 in Inter-Ac play. In other words, they’re playing for little more than pride, and that’s more or less been the case since mid-January.

“In the last two, two and a half weeks, we’re playing the best basketball that we’ve played all year,” Phillips said. It hasn’t translated into a lot of success in the standings, but most of the losses have been close.

Take January 24’s game against the Episcopal Academy. PC lost by 10, and was only down three at half. Three days later against Malvern Prep, the Quakers lost a three-point heartbreaker after being up six at the halftime bell.

On January 31, they lost by just seven to Germantown Academy.

“One of the things I’m most proud of is that they’re still playing. They haven’t quit,” Phillips said. “That’s the thing I was most fearful of, so I’m grateful that they’ve continued to persist.”

The lapses in concentration have gotten better as well, but they aren’t gone.

“They’ve shrunk. The issue is that some of the things that were occurring still are,” Phillips said. “That’s a little discouraging—the fact that some of our flaws are still there. We’ve got to do some soul searching and looking in the mirror.”

“We’ll see if it’ll be a learning experience for the younger guys, but we probably won’t be able to tell until next season,” Phillips said.

Holmes will be back, as well as this season’s leading scorer Mason Williams.

“The most consistent scorers we’ve had game-to-game have been Mason and Ryan,” Phillips said. “We’re obviously going to miss the contributions from some of the seniors, but to have those them back with Will Samuel, Ryan Maloney, Ryan Dickson, and Dylan Topaz having gotten minutes, there are some pieces there.”

“We’ll spend some time in the off-season working on some individual things and then worry about putting the collective pieces back together next fall,” Phillips said.

For now though, Phillips and co. have to remain in the present. Tuesday night featured the team’s last Inter-Ac tilt (against the Haverford School) and the Quakers will likely compete in the Pennsylvania Independent Schools Athletic Association season-ending tournament.

They’ll be a low seed, but are excited to play nonetheless.

Phillips said, “there’s still some meat on the bone.”

That, if nothing else, is a pretty good way to look at the end of what was a trying season.

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