Cardinal McCarrick off to a start few could have envisioned

SPOTSWOOD – When Ben Gamble, a longtime assistant under Hall of Fame coach Bob Hurley at St. Anthony, took the boys basketball head coaching job at Cardinal McCarrick last May his early thoughts when he walked in there were, “What the hell did I do?”

“I looked at what was there and kids that were there last year, they just started transferring without even meeting me,” Gamble said. “And they’re listening to other people giving them advice. So I pretty much just worked with what was there.”

As time wore on though, Gamble started getting a lot of phone calls from parents who were interested in sending their kids to the school, and low and behold, Cardinal McCarrick has been the breakout team this season in the Greater Middlesex Conference behind a roster that features seven transfers.

Their winning ways continued on Friday night as Cardinal McCarrick improved to 13-0 on the season with a dominating performance from start-to-finish on both ends of the court against defending Blue Division champion Spotswood, which entered with a 9-2 record, as a pair of junior guards in NyQuan McCombs and Gilberto Cue each scored a game-high 14 points in the Eagles’ 69-34 rout.

“Not at all, not at all,” said Cue, a Bergen Catholic transfer who also spent time as a freshman at St. Anthony, if he could have envisioned the team having this much success so soon. “A group of kids came in from everywhere, we didn’t know anybody. The only person I really knew was (NyQuan), I was with him my freshman year for about a month up at St. Anthony. So when we came together it was like, ‘Oh wow,’ but once we started getting in the gym kids kept transferring in and then you see the team here now, so this is where we’re at.”

RELATED:Boys basketball roundup for Friday, Jan. 23

Cue and McCombs, who have known each other since they were both in the sixth or seventh grade through the AAU circuit, complement each other strong in the backcourt, which has strong depth beyond the two of them.

The presence of Gamble and their familiarity of him was also a strong calling card for both players.

“He never lets us slack in practice,” said McCombs, a Staten Island resident who was the starting point guard on the freshman and junior varsity teams at St. Anthony over the past two seasons. “He’s always pushing us. He sees everything too. He’s just a good coach.”

The layers of this team lie beyond those two though – Elijah Mitchell, a Patrick School transfer, is the third starting guard and hit three second quarter 3s for all nine of his points in the win.

Big men Hodari Bazemore and Santiago Delvishaj have been critical inside and on the glass, doing the little things that don’t often get noticed in the box score, Gamble noted.

Ralph Menard and Josh Green, transfers from Elizabeth and Union Catholic, respectively, have been key guards off the bench while Bryan Harris, a Woodbridge transfer who recently became eligible after sitting out the required 30 days for transferring without a change of address, is another dimension for Gamble off the bench as he scored 10 on Friday.

“We pretty much feed off the guards,” Gamble said. “For a high school team, I’ve got some pretty good guards at this level and we pretty much can get after people and pressure them all over the place.”

And 13-0 is a start any coach would love to have, but for Gamble, he hopes it’s just the start of his team’s, and his program’s growth.

“As I said to a lot of coaches, I have a group that I’m not familiar with, they’re not familiar with me, but quickly I kind of adjusted them to a team quickly and we still have a lot of growing to do,” Gamble said. “I don’t want to peak right now, I want to peak in February.”

Staff writer Mike Becker: mbecker@mycentraljersey.com