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Jackiem Wright is not a savior for Franklin & Marshall’s basketball program. F&M, which has been churning out 20-win seasons for decades, doesn’t need saving. But Wright is a bridge from the program’s recent past to its future, and that the Diplomats can use. F&M went 26-4 last year, and reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Division III tournament. But it all ended one win short of the Final Four, with a 92-70 loss to Amherst at home. “It was a heartbreaking experience,’’ said Wright, one of F&M’s three leading scorers from last year, all (believed at the time to be) seniors. “Amherst was a great team, but we still feel we should have won the game.’’ Wright assumed, of course, that he had played his final college game. He hadn’t. F&M petitioned the NCAA to allow Wright another year, since his freshman year was spent at Division I La Salle, on the team but getting almost no playing time. The NCAA agreed. “I wasn’t sure how it would go,’’ F&M coach Glenn Robinson admitted Monday. “I thought we had a good chance, because I certainly thought he deserved another year.’’ Wright wasn’t recruited to play basketball at La Salle, and received no scholarship money. He went there not even intending to play organized basketball. But he spent many weekday afternoons that fall running with the La Salle varsity in informal pickup games. Then the season started, and Wright went out for and made the team as a walk-on. Not a glamorous gig. “I think they felt like they did me a favor,’’ he said. Wright practiced with the team, dressed for home games, but rarely traveled and almost never played, a total of six minutes for the year. Meanwhile, Wright’s best friend from high school at New Jersey’s Moorestown Friends School, Duran Searles, was a freshman guard at F&M. Wright began visiting Searles here, and falling in love with the school and the basketball program. There was a coaching change at La Salle during that year, Speedy Morris out and Billy Hahn in. Wright may eventually have been able to play for Hahn. “He said everything was up for grabs,’’ Wright said. But he knew he could play at F&M. “(Searles) talked to me about transferring,’’ he said. “It’s a better school academically, and that was important to my mom.’’ Mom wants you to know that Wright will graduate this spring with a degree in government. He would have been at F&M this academic year anyway. “I was really excited when I found out I’d be playing,’’ Wright said. “As soon as I knew I’d be back, I set a goal to get to the final eight or farther this year.’’ A lanky, 6-foot-2 two-guard, Wright is a shooter with the rare ability to get his high-arcing jumper off in heavy traffic. He’s always been a shooter. “My grandpa says it runs in the family,’’ Wright said. “It’s in the genes.’’ Grandpa is a veteran of the Philadelphia playground scene with acquaintances like Wilt Chamberlain and Sonny Hill. One of Jackiem’s uncles played at Lehigh. Another played at a college in Tennessee. All shooters. But Wright knew he’d have to be more than that to play at F&M. “The first question coach Robinson asked me was about defense,’’ Wright said. “It was pretty obvious to me that he was a defensive-oriented coach.’’ Moorestown Friends is, in Wright’s words, “an academic powerhouse but not a sports powerhouse.’’ He did not face much big-time competition before college. Defense wasn’t a strength at first. Now Wright is an outstanding perimeter defender, a scrambler with quick hands and feet. “Early on, he tended to put all his concentration on the offensive end,’’ Robinson said. “He got over that pretty fast. Now we usually put him on the other team’s best scorer, and that’s an honor.’’ Without Wright, this year’s F&M team would have been missing something. There are two big guys (the Lynch brothers, Bob and Dan), a superb small forward (Brandon Smith) and a point guard who played a lot last season (Logan Outerbridge). No two-guard. And where were all the points going to come from? Wright averaged 13 points per game last season, and became F&M’s 28th 1,000-point scorer in a season-opening win over DeSales Nov. 20. The Dips started the season ranked eighth by D-3news.com. DeSales was ranked 13th but got pounded; the final was 81-67 and it wasn’t that close. Robinson has nine freshmen on his 20-man roster, seven of them guards. That promising group needs a shepherd, and Wright is proving to be that. “I guess I’m a leader for our team,’’ Wright says. “I think they look up to me.’’ That’s where that bridge-to-the-future stuff comes in.
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