By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
Ben Stentz and Evan Moorhead were just a few years out of high school when their former Princeton High School basketball coach started the Princeton Recreation Men’s Summer Basketball League.
Nearly 30 years later, the league that Doug Snyder started with just three teams has developed into a community staple, with neighborhood residents knowing that if they head out to the basketball courts at Community Park, the league is still alive and kicking.
“It started with Doug wanting the Princeton High kids to have a place to play.,” recalled Stentz, a former commissioner of the league and currently the Princeton Recreation Director. “It grew from there with Dave Johnson and that group wanting to have a recreational league after they were out of high school.”
The league completed its 29th season on Wednesday night. While other area basketball leagues have come and gone, the Princeton league has endured. In fact, this season there were only a handful of players in the league who were born when that first season kicked off in 1989.
“If you ever played or coached in this league, you know if you come down on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday night there is going be basketball from mid-June until the end of July,” said Moorhead, the current league commissioner and Princeton Recreation’s Assistant Director. “You can count on it and there will always be some familiar faces.”
The league has been a labor of love for Stentz and Moorhead, who took over and have run the league for various stints since Snyder left Princeton High in the summer of 1997. While Moorhead is still running the league from day to day, Stentz is now an occasional visitor to Community Park.
“One day, when Evan retires from this the thing, he is going to figure out is that when you stop coming every night, you realize the rhythm of this whole thing never changes,” said Stentz, who was a player in the league during the early years. “The faces change but the rhythm of everything, from the parking lot to the people watching along the fence, to the banter at the table, that never changed.
“It’s just the faces and the players who change. When you don’t come all the time, like me, you realize how quickly you fall right back into it.”
The two have always tried to make sure the league never lost its community feel. People from the neighborhood and other areas of town have made it a habit of coming to the courts and checking out the action during the week.
“The thing I remember is, we always had a lot of people from the neighborhood out here,” said Erik Daniels, a former player and a member of the league’s Hall of Fame. “I still like to come out here a couple times a year and see that the league is still moving a along. The guys out on the court are a lot younger now but it’s still real competitive.”
There was a time when the competition level in the league rivaled any in the state during the summer. At the time, Division 1 college players were eligible to play in the league and players from Princeton, Rider and Rutgers would take to the court. Some even stayed on after they had graduated from college.
“There were some years in the early 2000s, with all the (Princeton) University guys like (Gabe) Lewullis, (Chris) Doyle, (Justin) Conway, (Ahmed) El-Nokali, they were young and in their prime, athletically,” Stentz said. “And we had all the Rider (University) guys like Jerry Johnson. We had some incredible players in the league at times. A guy like (Montgomery High grad and former Harlem Globetrotter) Derek Grant, he was amazing in this league.”
Moorhead, who won a championship as a player in the league, still takes to the microphone each night, throwing out league catch phrases and player nicknames. It’s part of the charm that has developed in the league over the last 29 years.
“I think Snyder started out the stuff on the mic because I remember him doing shoutouts to the people in the crowd,” Moorhead said. “The phrases just kind of came and some of them we even put on shirts. We had the Larry Perks Special, because he would always stay for the 9 p.m. game so that became the Larry Perks Special. We once had a shirt that said Worst Free Throw Shooting League in America. You Gotta Finish came from a lot of missed layups.
“We thought of putting together a list of all the nicknames. Some of the best were ones like Keith ‘The Wizard Jones, Ike “Play him to Shoot’ Davis, and we had the one guy, Mo Hobbs, that we called ‘Play Him to Talk.’ There were a lot of them. Darius ‘Forever’ Young.”
Added Stentz: “The nicknames and phrases all all generated from us just trying to stay entertained. In my memory, Keith Jones was the first guy I remember having a nickname for. He was the original. In those years he was in good shape, could score, had this little Isiah Thomas thing with the dribble and we called him the Wizard.”
Stentz and Moorhead have seen the league grow. There is always an ebb and flow to it, with the league peaking at 12 teams one year. This year there were eight teams in one of the most competitive seasons the league has enjoyed. The Packer Hall All-Stars, who finished seventh in the regular season, managed to capture the league playoff championship.
“One of the great things is you see a guy like Terry Bannon, who I played with in this league nearly 30 years ago,” Stentz said. “I run into him somewhere and we start talking like we had just played a week or two ago. That’s a guy I might have never known if we hadn’t played together in this league way back when.”
Next summer the league will celebrate a landmark 30th season. And you can expect to see Moorhead back out at the Community Park courts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
“As long as there are guys who want to play basketball, we’ll probably have a league,” he said.
