City of Basketball Love

Andrew Robinson (@ADRobinson3)

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HATBORO >> They just can’t stop winning.

Officially, they were the Cyber Pink team in the 30th contention of the Philadelphia/Suburban Women’s Summer Basketball League. Unofficially, it’s a collection of local college graduates that call their team the “Slayers” and make postgame trips to the PJ Whelihan’s in Horsham a regular occurrence all through June and July.

They also keep winning the league’s championship.

The alums collected their fourth straight title Thursday night defeating Sky Blue (Holy Family) 60-49 at Kelly Bolish Gym thanks to a fourth quarter comeback .

“Personally, this is my highlight for the week,” Taylor Hamm, a 2022 USciences graduate, said. “Every Tuesday and Thursday, we're locked in, we’re so excited for the game then we go to PJ’s after and have a great time there. There’s a whole community that’s come from this team and it’s so much fun.”

Shannon May won her fourth straight summer league Thursday, while Hamm, Cassie (Sebold) Spratt, Kate Connolly and Lexie Edwards made it three in a row. As for Jen Kremp, she has them all beat. The Jenkintown/Dickinson grad now part of five straight league titles – she was with Holy Family’s group in 2019, then the last four summers with the alumni-led teams.

The alumni team started the summer of 2021 with a collection of USciences graduates who didn’t get a senior year putting together a squad, supplemented with a few players still in college including Kremp, to help the league rebound after having to take the summer of 2020 off due to the Covid-19 pandemic. May played with that group, not planning to use her extra of college eligibility but changed her mind after that summer’s title run and was part of the final USciences team before the university merged with St. Joe’s following the end of the 2021-22 year.

The "Slayers" celebrate their fourth straight Philadelphia Summer Women's Basketball League championship. (Photo: Andrew Robinson/CoBL)

In the summer of 2022, May and Spratt reunited on the same team for the first time since they graduated from Archbishop Wood in 2017, then they started filling in the rest of the roster. Hamm, Connolly and Edwards were added and Kremp stayed on to form the core of the team the last three summers.

“It helps that we have a lot of friends who play basketball and are pretty good at basketball,” May said. “That’s the biggest thing, we’re playing with our friends so it’s a fun thing that we’re doing together. Nobody says ‘I have to go play basketball on Tuesday or Thursday,’ it’s something we look forward to, then make a night out of it and hang out together.”

The rest of the roster’s changed a bit each summer, with a variety of reasons meaning one or two players from the prior summer were unable to play again. If a spot opens up, the remaining players go through their contacts and see who else might be interested.

They added Lauren Crim last summer after her fifth year with Chestnut Hill College, the Lansdale Catholic grad coming back again for her second championship in a row. This year, the team added Kaitlyn Carter following her final season at Chestnut Hill along with Jess Genco and Rylee Derr.

This summer, the alumni also finished as the top team in the 10-team league’s regular season. That hasn’t been the case for all four of their titles but with a group that did a lot of winning in high school and in college, they can turn it up for the playoff games.

“We have fun but we all still want to win,” Hamm said. “We’re still all so competitive and it definitely helps.”

“It’s our only competitive thing we get to do anymore,” May said with a laugh. “Everyone else here, they’re still playing for real with their college team but for us, this is our only chance to still play.”

May was supposed to be in Poland on Thursday, but a long ordeal ending with a canceled flight prevented her from going. Hamm joked that May canceled the flight on her own just to make the championship game, the two USci grads then cracking up laughing, something that’s also a regular occurrence within the group.

The team, of course, has a group chat and they get together plenty outside of league nights in June and July but the summer league games are always a group highlight.

“I really start thinking about it in the winter, I see the teams in their season and starting to play for championships and I really do miss that part of it,” Hamm said. “It is a year-round thing, at least for me.”

For Hamm and May, the league is also a way to keep the USciences banner flying. There are two former USciences players still playing on college rosters and both of them – West Chester's Anna McTamney and Rowan’s Shayla Johnson, both were freshmen on the final Devils team – also played in the league this summer.

With the CACC making up a good portion of the league with Jefferson, Holy Family, Chestnut Hill and Goldey-Beacom all fielding summer teams, Hamm noted there are still plenty of familiar opponents to play against too.

“We don’t have alumni events, we can’t go back to games so it’s at least nice to be able to see them here,” May said.

So far, an early alarm to get up for work the next morning, a late shift leading to a rush effort to get over to the gym and hop in midway through a game or any of the other myriad of “real world” barriers haven’t dissuaded the team’s core group from giving it up yet. For the “Slayers,” it’s still just too much fun and as long as the league lets them, they want to be a part of it.

“Whenever I tell somebody I play in this league, I always think about how it’s so competitive,” Hamm said. “It’s awesome we are allowed to play in this and they give us that chance.”

“It’s definitely nice they let us come back each year,” May said. ‘I think we’ll keep coming back until they tell us ‘you’re too old to come back, stop coming.’”

With that, May and Hamm shared another laugh then it was time to get to PJ’s.