ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – Kevair Kennedy first started playing basketball at six years old. His father, Kevin, put the ball in his hands on local courts in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood and quickly signed him up to play his first organized games. Instead of playing in his own age division, Kevin signed Kennedy up to […]
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – Kevair Kennedy first started playing basketball at six years old. His father, Kevin, put the ball in his hands on local courts in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood and quickly signed him up to play his first organized games.
Instead of playing in his own age division, Kevin signed Kennedy up to play with the eight-year-old team. He threw his son into the deep end immediately, and the only thing Kennedy could do was learn how to swim.
By the time Kennedy reached his freshman year of high school, he was so used to playing with older kids that he never looked out of place in Father Judge High School practices despite his then-5-foot-6 frame. So prodigious was Kennedy’s energy and effort that he was named a captain before his sophomore campaign. His teammates, older and younger, rallied around him. After he finished a storied high school career, he stepped onto the court at the college level for Merrimack and once again immediately earned the trust of his teammates.
On Wednesday, Kennedy was unanimously named MAAC Player of the Year, becoming the first freshman to ever win the award. Over the next six days, he’ll look to lead Merrimack to its first-ever NCAA Division-I Tournament appearance at the MAAC Tournament in Atlantic City. It’s just 60 miles from Hunting Park, where the lessons that he learned are still the foundation of his championship mentality and unmatched gravitas.
Two years younger than his teammates and opponents, playing outside in parks, inside in gyms, Kennedy was at an inherent physical disadvantage from the start. It doesn’t help that he didn’t end up growing into his body until very late in his childhood and was small even for his own age. Unlike former Merrimack point guard Budd Clark, who was a natural on the ball from the moment he picked one up, Kennedy didn’t touch the ball a ton early in his basketball career.
“My first couple of years, I wasn’t too much of a skill guy,” Kennedy told Mid-Major Madness of his first foray into the sport. “I just used to do all the little dirty work.”
Kevin, a basketball player himself, continued to pour into him. He’d play 1-on-1 with his son and consistently challenge him with older players.
It’s why even though he’s one of the highest-usage players in the MAAC, and it’s hard to imagine him without the ball in his hands, he plays with the soul of a glue guy.
“Once he played for Team Jacko at the Philly Triple Threat and his play style on the court was aggressive, a dawg,” Kevin said. “If he played hard, it made (his teammates) play hard. He dove on the floor for loose balls, [and] it made other kids do that.”
Chris Roantree became the head coach at Father Judge High School in 2021. He inherited a roster that went 2-10 in the Philadelphia Catholic League.
Kennedy had just graduated from Esperanza Middle School, and as his AAU teammates filed off to different high schools, it took Kennedy a little bit longer to find the place for his next four years. Kevin prioritized finding a place where his son would be able to play early, which eliminated powerful programs like Imhotep Charter. But as the months turned on the calendar and Kennedy still didn’t have a school lined up, Kevin started to stress out.
He didn’t want to send him to a public school, as he wanted to prioritize education. While Kevin was in the process of talking to coaches at Cristo Rey, Kennedy went with a friend to work out at Father Judge on the invitation of his friend’s father.
Roantree needed players to build his program around, and Kennedy was a perfect fit.
He wanted to find players with a chip on their shoulder. Kennedy had that in spades. Just days into his tenure at Father Judge, he got into a fight in practice. He was the little freshman who came with a ton of bark and a ton of bite.
“He just wasn’t going to back down,” Roantree told Mid-Major Madness. “I’m glad nothing escalated more of it. But it just showed me he was a tough kid, and he wanted to compete. He wasn’t going to be afraid of anything.”
“In the Catholic League, you definitely need some toughness because if you don’t, y’all gonna have a long season,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy played JV as a freshman, but it was the soul of the role player of past years that had him doing all of the little things in practice, which impressed Roantree to the point where he gave him starts at point guard by the end of the season.
That Judge team wasn’t very good, but it was the start of a program rebuild, and Roantree had the centerpiece.
He named Kennedy a rare sophomore captain that offseason.
“Your work ethic and willingness to compete,” he told Kennedy. “I want that to drive my culture and my program.”
Towards the end of Kennedy’s freshman campaign, Roantree thought about the idea of naming him captain thanks to how hard he worked. He eventually made that decision to set an example for the future as he knew that he could coach Kennedy extremely hard but still get a positive reaction out of him because of his mentality.
By the time the decision was made, Roantree called it a no-brainer.
“I probably coached him harder than any kid I’ve coached in my career,” Roantree said. “And he really bought into that. Even as a freshman, I was a little hard on him. If you can coach (your hardest working guy) hard, I can coach everybody else hard, and he was really good at that.”
So he set the example on the coach’s side, but he needed to grow into the role on his own accord.
Kennedy admitted that he didn’t know much about leadership, but what he did know about was playing hard and playing tough.
Still, he felt the pressure of the captaincy and program.
“Like how much, like what do you really want me to do as a sophomore?” he said. “It was a little bit of a weight.”
Devante Chance grew up on the same Hunting Park block as Kennedy about 15 years earlier. A Division-II hooper in his day, Chance always kept his door open as a trainer for Kevair to enter, and he finally did in high school.
Chance loved Kennedy’s game.
“He naturally made winning plays on both sides of the ball,” Chance told Mid-Major Madness.
But Chance urged him to share it.
“It was really about just being outspoken, using your voice,” Chance said. “Being an extension of the coach on the basketball court, not shying away from just expressing himself about how he feels on the court and what he sees on the court and just being infectious, taking his competitiveness and transferring it to his teammates.”
Kevin said that Kennedy would work with Chance twice a day, every day after school, and these sessions were intense. Beyond the usual on-court training, Chance had deep conversations with Kennedy in order to expand his mental game.
It paid off, as Kennedy took the bull by the horns. His teammates fell in love with his energy and embraced their younger captain, just the same way that his teammates appreciated having him aboard when he was six.
“We had guys that had been in the program for a few years, and he would’ve quote unquote taken their spot,” Roantree said. “But they all love him because he was a good kid but just he just outworked everyone.”
Judge once again struggled in Kennedy’s sophomore year but showed improvement. They played a play-in game in the Catholic League playoffs and lost, but Roantree urged them to remember the feeling. Kennedy didn’t need any urging.
“I hate losing,” he said.
Using Chance’s advice, Kennedy spoke up more throughout his years as captain, evolving his leadership style and becoming an extension of the coaching staff on the floor.
But even when he spoke, at the beginning, he didn’t always have the right tone.
“I had to learn to like try to get the message across but and not in a crazy temper,” Kennedy said. “I used to try to get it across in a crazy temper, and sometimes it wouldn’t work. So, I had to learn how to control myself and talk to people for them to understand.”
Joe Gallo doesn’t start recruiting players early, but he’s recruited enough players out of the Philadelphia area to know where to start. Gallo and his Merrimack staff had watched a lot of Philadelphia Catholic League ball when recruiting Budd Clark, who lifted West Catholic to a championship-level program.
Just a year later, as Clark tore it up as a freshman for Merrimack, Kennedy had his breakout campaign with Judge.
He wasn’t 5-foot-6 anymore, and he’d grown not only into his body, but into one of the better players in the Catholic League by the time he was a junior.
Roantree said that Kennedy was always a downhill attacking guard, even when he was just 115 pounds, but he finally had not just the strength but the skillset to complete his game.
“I think his evolution was the decision-making,” Roantree said. “He cut down on the turnovers because he started to make the right decision when he got in the paint.”
If you’re a point guard, you want to go to Merrimack. Gallo wants to put the ball in your hands. He did it with Juvaris Hayes. He did it with Javon Bennett, and then with Clark. It’s an easy pitch to make.
“I think now it’s kind of selling itself,” Gallo told Mid-Major Madness. “You get to work through a lot of things. So you get to play through a lot of mistakes. People ask about our player development and how our guys get better. I do think our coaches do a really good job with them, but I also think you develop from getting all the game reps that they get.”
But despite being the best point guard in Philly, Kennedy still didn’t have the offers that some of the other players in the area had. His team took down Jalil Bethea’s Archbishop Wood squad in the PCL quarterfinals, but nobody seemed to notice.
Roantree said he was the best player on the floor in a summer game against Sidwell Friends, led by current Villanova point guard Acaden Lewis, but nobody seemed to notice.
“I couldn’t understand why people didn’t recruit him after that game,” Roantree said.
Chance has his theories.
“I don’t feel like he was promoted or spoke enough about in the city,” he said. “The city is heavy politics in general, (and Kennedy wasn’t) attached to big names coming out of the city. And I could identify it because it was just things that happened when I was in high school as well.”
Kevin said that Wagner was Kennedy’s first offer, but that it was “hearsay,” and that the Seahawks didn’t really have a spot for him. Then, Kennedy took an unofficial visit to FDU, but never got an offer.
Chance used his own experiences in the city to help Kennedy through the difficult period.
When Merrimack came to recruit him, the tone was different.
“They were gonna give him a chance,” Kevin said. “They didn’t guarantee nothing, but they said if he could come in here and work, we play freshmen, so that’s all he needed to hear.”
And he committed to Merrimack.
At that moment, Kennedy already won. He accomplished the original goal.
“He comes from a place in Philly where kids have an option of either go to the streets or go play basketball and go to school and be successful,” Roantree said. “He chose that route.”
But the work at Judge wasn’t done. He wanted to deliver a championship to that community. Kennedy removed all distractions, deleting all of the apps off of his phone and not listening to the outside noise.
And with a season that Kevin called legendary, Kennedy led the Crusaders to their first PCL Championship in since the 90s.
Inside the Palestra in the semifinal, Judge faced regular-season champion St. Joseph’s Prep, featuring Kennedy’s friend, and league MVP Jordan Ellerbee. Although the two are friendly, Kennedy wanted everybody to know who should’ve been the MVP.
“He just said he didn’t know how 13 coaches feel like he’s that much better,” Kevin said. “He only had two votes.”
By the end of the night, there was no question.
Kennedy put on one of the greatest performances in PCL history, a triple-double to lead Judge to a stunning upset at the Cathedral of College Basketball.
“He had something to prove,” Roantree said. “He takes a lot of things personally and remembers a lot of things. So it was a pretty special moment, not just for him, but for our program to win that game and get a shot for a championship.”
Two nights later, he was a PCL champion. A few weeks later, he was a state champion.
Even though he shut off distractions, he still felt the noise. It built up in him through the years. Ever since he’d decided to attend Judge as a freshman, he said that people told him that he’d never win a championship.
“They said Father Judge is never gonna win no championship,” Kennedy said. “So I was always going to prove them wrong.”
As a freshman at Merrimack, he had to earn the trust of a whole new group of players. But that was never actually going to be difficult for him, as he’d done it so many different times.
The Warriors brought in veterans in the offseason in Todd Brogna, KC Ugwuakazi, Andres Marrero, and Kennedy’s former Judge teammate, Ernest Shelton, to surround the rookie point guard. Those players came to Merrimack with winning on their minds, as this was a program that had won three regular-season championships in the previous six years.
Before he even played a game for the Warriors, Kennedy was a team leader. Gallo says he’s never seen a veteran team rally around a freshman like this before.
“A lot of it is his personality off the court,” Gallo said. “When you watch him play, you rarely see any negative body language. Every room he walks in, he’s smiling. People on campus gravitate to him. When you walk in the cafeteria, there’s just like three or four random students sitting with him talking. He just kind of gives off an energy that you want to rally around him. And I think obviously his play is his play, but a lot of how he acts is what also makes him super special.”
Gallo isn’t the only one who loves Kennedy’s smile.
“My wife always talks about his smile,” Roantree said. “I think our wives are watching more Merrimack games than Judge games right now.”
On the court, Kennedy is much different from his predecessor in Clark. Instead of being a mid-range maestro that lulls you to sleep with his pacing and dribbling, he plays like an animal in getting into the lane.
But he always makes the right decisions in the paint. It once again comes from the soul of a glue guy put in the body of a superstar. And now he has a massive volume of decisions on his shoulders each game, and that’s just what his teammates want.
“They trust my decisions,” Kennedy said. “If I make a bad decision, they still keep my head up. If I make a good decision, they let me know it’s a good decision. The key to the success I’m having right now is the trust that everyone has in me.”
Kennedy kept stacking together good performances, and Merrimack kept winning. Heading into a crucial weekend in February with matchups against Marist and Quinnipiac, Kennedy embarked on one of the most impressive stretches a freshman has had in the MAAC in many years.
Over the next four games, against four teams that made the MAAC Tournament including three that got byes, he played 173 of 175 minutes and averaged 24.5 points, 4.8 assists and 4.5 rebounds. He got in the lane at will, attempting 12 free throws per game. Most importantly? Merrimack won all four games, and Kennedy was KenPom MVP in all of them.
“The games that we won, I put up a good performance,” Kennedy said. “It was like ‘we won, so why stop.’ Just keep going, keep going, we gotta get the win.”
It sealed his case for MAAC Player of the Year. Gallo had never seen anything like it from a freshman. He exceeded every expectation the staff had.
“I thought he’d be a rookie of the year type guy,” he said. “But it’s pretty clear now that he should be the player of the year as well. It didn’t take very long to see that putting the ball in No. 5’s hands, especially down the stretch, was what it was going to take to have the success we’ve had.”
Gallo may be surprised, but back home, nobody is.
“Am I shocked? Absolutely not,” Roantree said. “I think he’s a guy that was going to prove everybody wrong.”
“I know he can play way better than he’s been playing,” Chance added. “He’s a competitor, so he’s never satisfied. He still impresses me, but like I said, I feel like he hasn’t put together the best game that he could put together yet.”
He still has three more games to win in Atlantic City, but he’s made history. Not only did he rally the team, but the team rallied the Merrimack community. Lawler Arena turned into a fortress with ‘I Love Joe Gallo’ t-shirts and raucous student sections.
He finally got that MVP. Unquestioned. Unanimous. And the first freshman to ever win it in the MAAC.
“It means my work is paying off,” Kennedy said. “It’s definitely something I take pride in.”
But like in high school, he remembers being doubted.
“They had us seventh in the preseason,” he said. “So it was fuel to the fire already.”
Category: General Sports
