Ballin' with the seminarians

The Cincinnati Enquirer features an article about the Minor Prophets, the basketball team at Mount St. Mary's seminary.

MT. WASHINGTON – They’re a young team in terms of eligibility. Their starting five and sixth man all have game. The seventh, eighth and ninth men all are physical.

But their best shooter is 42, their tallest player is 6-foot-3 and they throw the ball away too much. Their approach to handling tough defenses is this: “We know each other pretty well – we’ll be able to handle it if somebody presses us.”

This basketball team does, however, have the best nickname in town. They are the Minor Prophets of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Mt. Washington.

Their only games are in a three-day tournament that begins today in Columbus at the Pontifical College Josephinum. That’s a fancy name for a place where guys in shorts and tank tops tip it off today in the seminary circuit’s version of the Elite Eight.

OK, so there are only eight teams in the tournament. But this is still the Minor Prophets’ March Madness no matter what the calendar says.

One of the players is my brother, the homeschooled guy who "plays six musical instruments and is in an Irish band."

Will Egan played some organized sports as a kid, but, who knows, maybe he’d have played more if he wasn’t home-schooled. It was he who brought in his buddies from the West Side to play the Minor Prophets in a full-scale scrimmage at Guardian Angel gym last Tuesday night.

Egan can spot the open man, has some good moves and decent quickness, is selfless, and just needs to play more so he will learn to open up the passing lanes and won’t need to thread the needle quite so much.

“I’m no John Stockton,” he says, a reference to the retired assists king of the Utah Jazz. “I’m also not a scorer. I’ve just got to find a way to get it to the big guys.”

I'd root for the Minor Prophets to beat the team from the Josephinum if it weren't that one of my other brothers is still up at the Josephinum...

H/T t0 commenter Barb -- why did I not hear about this from anyone in my family?