Family bonding, more than anything else, has strengthened Saint Peter’s through Cinderella run

Matthew Lee (15) and Doug Edert (25) celebrate Saint Peter’s upset of Purdue Friday with teammates behind them. (Photo by Jaden Daly/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

PHILADELPHIA — If you’ve watched the pregame and postgame press conferences throughout the NCAA Tournament, you’ve seen it. If you are among the fortunate ones blessed to have covered Saint Peter’s at any point this year, you’ve expected it.

Six players, the half-dozen veterans who comprise the core of the Cinderella Peacocks, are mainstays in media availabilities. For they are the six who not only subscribed to a vision that had yet to be placed into practice, saw it through, and have now broadened that horizon to the brink of college basketball’s largest stage.

Welcome to Shaheen Holloway’s extended family.

So many things for Saint Peter’s have been intangible, sometimes inexplicable, as the Peacocks have shocked the world on the way to Sunday’s East Regional final against North Carolina. But for those with even a slight knowledge of the Jersey City school, the close-knit nature of a group of players that reflects its leader’s effervescent charisma and magnetic personality has made it even more formidable.   

“That’s who we are,” Holloway again said after his team joined him in his postgame interview with CBS immediately after Saint Peter’s added Purdue to its collection of March victims. “Those are our guys, and that’s what we do. Every time we have a press conference, I make sure these six guys are up here. They’re the guys that started the foundation.”

“We’re like that. We’re for real. That’s genuine. If you watch us, you come to practice, you take bus trips with us, this is who we are. We’re not changing because we’re here. We’re a tight-knit family.”

For some of the elder statesmen on the Saint Peter’s roster, the relationships they currently enjoy began long before any of them even thought about where they would ply their wares in the collegiate ranks. Daryl Banks III and Doug Edert played against one another in high school, while twins Fousseyni and Hassan Drame teamed up with point guard Matthew Lee in AAU ball. The familiarity bred company, and later, fraternity.

“(Banks) was my roommate since day one,” Edert recalled, sharing the story of how his backcourt partner was the first person he met on campus. “It was nice getting to know somebody you’re going to be with for a really long time. Our friendship turned into a brotherhood, and it’s just amazing to be where we are now.”

“I really didn’t like (Edert) much neither,” Banks said with a laugh. “He used to always get me in the fall leagues. But moving in the first day and actually being roommates with him was kind of funny. We grew as a brotherhood and then added the twins and Matthew. We’ve been together for so long, and it’s just great to do what they’re doing now.”

Add that to a coach in Holloway who doubles as a father figure of sorts, and the mutual respect each has for the other is a driving force behind the ever-present all-for-one, one-for-all culture that has become unique in today’s game with the ongoing reliance on the transfer portal to build teams and expedite chemistry.

“You look to the sideline — you might have made a bad play or something — but you see somebody encouraging you and giving you kind words,” Lee said of Holloway and the method to his madness, so to speak. “He’s been here before. He’s been a player, he knows what we’re going through. It’s kind of just easy to play for him.”

“He has your best interest at heart,” KC Ndefo proudly said. “Just listening to the message and not the tone, you know when that happens, he’s going to pick you up after.”

Coaching was almost a natural segue for Holloway to continue his involvement with the game after his playing career was over. Needing a way to support his daughter, born while he was still in high school, only served to accelerate the proceedings.

“It was always in me,” Holloway said of the coaching bug, which began under Nick Mariniello at Bloomfield Tech and took flight at the Division I level when he served as the video coordinator at Seton Hall under Bobby Gonzalez. “I think when you’re a point guard, coaching is kind of in you.”

“It’s like (being) a quarterback. Most quarterbacks become coaches because you see the game, you know what everybody’s supposed to do. I think it’s important to learn from the bottom up. You appreciate it more, and I think it helped me identify who I am and what I could bring to the table.”

To say Saint Peter’s learned on the fly in each of the past two seasons would be an understatement. The Peacocks did not have a home gym last year, as Run Baby Run Arena was still in the midst of its multimillion-dollar renovation, shifting all home games up the block from the school to Division III New Jersey City University. And with the pandemic still yet to be controlled at the time, Saint Peter’s practiced off-site at the now-closed Marist High School in nearby Bayonne. Then, after being the only school in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference to not incur a positive COVID test last season, the Peacocks were sidelined for 26 days this year when two-thirds of the team contracted the virus during a break Holloway now cites as the turning point for his program.

“You’re practicing with each other for the last two years,” he said. “I didn’t let my guys go home because of COVID. I wanted to have a season, so we were together for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. When you start spending time like that, it’s real, it’s genuine. A bond happens, a connection happens. We spend more time with each other than we spend with our families.”

“I’m so happy for these guys. They put so much time and effort into it. For six, seven months of the year dealing with me, this is easy for them. We got a chance to really regroup and start all over, like a little mini-camp. And once we did that, this team started clicking because we started playing different lineups, other guys started getting confident. Once you get 11-12 guys competing at a high level, it’s going to make you better.”

Finally, the why factor motivates this group just as much. For Holloway, often dismissed for his small stature and cast aside, the chance to pay it forward after coaches the likes of Kevin Boyle, Chris Chavannes and Tommy Amaker threw him a life preserver led him to this position, and his unconditional love for his players is just as unbridled as the emotion and energy with which they compete.

“I wanted to be a coach because a lot of people took a chance on me when it was so easy to go the other way,” Holloway reflected. “I wanted to be that guy to take a chance on some kids that people don’t want or are pushing away, or got in trouble and need a second chance. That’s kind of what I’m about.”

That is Saint Peter’s basketball in a nutshell.