The game against Lower Merion was different – partially because of Bryant, partially because Lacey was battling the flu. And the idea of us getting to play against the best, it just made every guy on that team, myself included, just extremely excited to get on the court and face him.” “We just had a team filled with guys who loved to play basketball. “There was nothing but excitement,” Lacey said. Lacey, a 6-foot-9 all-state center whose presence dominated the floor, recalled how much his team relished the opportunity to play such stout competition. “He was averaging 36 points per game, and if he got that, well, our job was to stop everybody else.” “We watched a lot of film and saw how different teams approached him and kind of resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren’t going to actually make any extra effort to stop him,” Thornton said Monday. Understanding that Bryant would be the Mounties’ biggest obstacle, Thornton’s ultimate goal was to stop him from scoring. So from a coach’s standpoint, it’s a dream group to have.” But they also had a really high basketball IQ. In fact, they’re still very close to each other.
“You had a really talented group who were very close to each other. “That team had everything a coach wants it to have,” Thornton said. In 1996, Stroudsburg was, itself, an imposing force, entering that contest with a 26-4 record with starters Ken Lacey, Mark Slavin, Kyle Reed, Tarik El-Bassiouni and Emmet Donnelly. The news of Bryant’s tragic death in a helicopter crash in California on Sunday triggered a flood of memories for Thornton, who still teaches social studies at Stroudsburg, dating back to their teams’ lone head-to-head competition. Thornton, former coach of the Stroudsburg High School boys basketball team for 22 years, had the unique task of coaching against Bryant in 1996, when his Mounties battled Bryant’s Lower Merion team in the PIAA Class 4A quarterfinal round at Martz Hall in Pottsville. Kobe Bryant was a dominating force long before he embarked on a remarkable 20-year career in the NBA.
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