It’s hard to predict what a team will bring any given night. That’s partially just high school basketball, partially a young team still hammering out its identity.
But on the bus ride to the Gilman School for the MIAA A Conference quarterfinal on Tuesday night, Archbishop Spalding coach Josh Pratt read signs in the silence. His players were dead quiet, just as they had been tripping up to defeat Loyola Blakefield in mid-January.
Pratt turned to his assistant coach, and only partly joking, and said, “I think they’re ready to go. I guess we’ll find out.”
“It’s not a rocket science,” Pratt said, “but you can just tell sometimes.”
On preseason paper, even Pratt didn’t believe a 180-degree turnaround from last year’s issues was possible. Last year, Spalding took up residence in the cellar of the A Conference, going 6-22 with just five league wins. They claimed just four wins total the year before.
And yet, these Cavaliers, who finished fourth in the A Conference Red Division standings and sit with 18 wins, just downed a No. 1 seeded team. As they venture to No. 2 Mount Saint Joseph on Thursday night at 6 p.m. for the semifinal round of the playoff tournament, the underdogs of the A Conference continue to prove they don’t match anyone’s predictions.
“Being in a position we’re in, it surprises me but doesn’t surprise me. If you were to ask me when I got the job, would we be in this position, I would say, ‘We’d love to be in that position, but we need to do A, B and C,'” Pratt, who was hired in late May 2019, said. “And we’ve done those things.”
Before anything else could happen, Pratt had to inspire his bunch of primarily sophomores and juniors to believe in him, as well as his staff. He had to cultivate a culture in which trust flowed between coach and player, and between younger players and older.
It helped that, with such a young team starting from the bottom, the longtime coach was working with a mostly blank sheet of paper.
“I think there was no pressure,” Pratt said. “I think part of changing the culture is having the kids believe that they are one of the better teams in the league. How do you develop that? Well, winning helps.”
The Cavaliers turned in wins against seven teams they couldn’t beat last winter, including Annapolis Area Christian, Saint Maria Goretti, Boys’ Latin, McDonogh and Pallotti.
“Really, our attitudes got better. Last year, in practice, we were a little bit shaky. Our attitudes got messed up,” sophomore Cam Whitmore said. “Mainly, our chemistry got a whole lot better.”
And as Spalding began to galvanize together, they formed a hurricane, with 6-foot-6 sophomore Whitmore standing as the eye of the storm.
Three of the five sophomores of this year’s team endured the 2018-19 season, but not Whitmore, who missed his freshman season with a knee injury.
In that time, the young forward learned patience.
“A lot of waiting, a lot of thinking, a lot of working out trying to get my knee right and get my knee stronger. That was the main goal,” Whitmore said. “I came back and was a little bit slow, but I started building that confidence I had. It was just there.”
Whitmore has netted double figures 20 times this year, including a double-double against Mount Saint Joseph (16 points, 12 rebounds) two weeks ago, helping to earn him a spot on the All-Baltimore Catholic League first team a few days ago.
It all culminated for him on Tuesday night, as Whitmore rained down 34 points on Gilman’s floor.
“Cam’s just a great kid. He’s worked extremely hard,” Pratt said. “We’ve been focusing on his leadership and I think he’s really come up.”
On either side of Whitmore are other sophomores who’ve begun to shine in their own right.
CJ Scott is averaging 14 points per game. Ty Peterson, who hauled in 23 points against Mount Saint Joseph in the second clash, has averaged 13 points. Both were honorable mentions for the BCL awards.
Jordan Pennick, averaging eight points and 4.3 rebounds per game, was key on the glass against Gilman and popped in two game-securing free throws late in the fourth quarter.
“The most important thing was just to be together,” Pennick said. “Last year, it was an individualistic team. It was about who scored the most points and we ended up losing by 30. Pratt came in and preached playing as a team.”
With so many younger players’ stars on the rise, it was possible for friction between those sophomores and the seniors who had paid their dues through some bad years.
Instead, the seniors settled into other roles. N’Kobe Turner, whom Spalding selected for the Dave Kropfelder “Never, Never Quit” Award, is a shutdown defensive figure in short minutes. Tyler Clark is a shapeshifter, taking charges and other acts that don’t make the scorebook.
Josh Akers came off the bench on Tuesday and shot a triple that protected Spalding’s lead over Gilman before the half. He was happy for a change this year.
“It’s been good. My role changed from last year to this year, but all the seniors accepted our role,” Akers said. “We all bought in. We know the sophomores are talented and have bright futures.
The sophomores see that, and show their appreciation through their play.
“I think the kids really like each other and play for each other. They’re enjoying the moment, as a group,” Pratt said.
And to Akers and the other seniors, it feels like Pratt and the sophomores have given them a gift.
“At the beginning of the year I never thought we would be in this position. I’ve never even played in the MIAA playoffs,” Akers said. “To still be there, to beat the No. 1 seed last night, it’s awesome.”
Part of working up good chemistry came down to holding one another accountable. Though Pratt and his staff, and to some extent the sophomores who only had one down year to go off of, couldn’t be held to task for last year’s six-win season, they were now responsible for every triumph and stumble they made this winter.
“We just try to be positive with the kids, in whatever we do. Try to hold them accountable, and then really preach having them hold each other accountable,” Pratt said. “It’s like teaching — you have an objective, you got your plan on how you want to meet your objectives and setting a goal.”
That all had to happen as the Cavaliers took some licks early on in the season, dropping the first two games by margins of three — to Gilman — and 43 points, and even in the final week of the season, as Mount Carmel walked into Spalding’s gym on Feb. 12 and routed them, 84-59.
“To bounce back against Goretti (two days later) really shows the sign the kids are learning from this season and learning what they need to do to win and be competitive,” Pratt said. “That’s the fun part … The fun part is the journey.”
They knew it was coming like a forecast for a polar vortex, the week in mid-January where Spalding would hit the road for four-straight road games, just a few days after traveling a combined 232 roundtrip miles to Goretti and Calvert Hall.
And yet, the Cavaliers won all but the last one against John Carroll. Between 7 p.m. on the last day of January and 4:30 p.m. on the first day of February, Spalding posted a pair of two- and three-point victories with Whitmore at the helm, scoring a combined 37 points and the go-ahead 3-pointer in the second game against the Potomac School.
It was around then that Whitmore stepped firmly into his role as a leader.
“I sensed a different Cam against Goretti,” Pratt said. “He made eye contact with me, he was talking to me during the game, taking suggestions. Our relationship, along with the other players, you can tell they’re really focused in on winning the game. Anything we can do to win.”
But even before then, Pratt saw glimpses of the team that would become a contender in film. For a group of mostly young players still progressing mentally as much as skillfully, Pratt has seen the slowed-down, chill environment of individual and team sessions sinking in more with the Cavaliers than anything he could tell them during game-time.
More than their opponents, which any player would want to analyze to pick up tendencies, the Spalding players watch themselves.
“The kids can really see how they play, and what we focus in on is valuing possessions, time and score,” Pratt said.
The Cavaliers have taken those lessons seriously. After dropping to Mount Saint Joseph earlier in the season, it turned around to win 67-56 on Feb. 5.
After Tuesday’s game, Pratt told his players, “You have to earn this one.”
“I can’t be more happy with the way things are going,” Pratt said. “As far as predicting, obviously confidence-wise for me, I have high expectations, but, I’m enjoying the ride.”
