The basketball season was approaching, but the seventh and eighth graders at St. Denis still needed a coach. And there he was: George Raveling, a former captain at Villanova who came to speak at a Little League banquet. The boys from Havertown had their man.
“We said, ‘Hey, Mr. Raveling. You think you’d want to coach us next fall?’” Mike Cawley said. “We knew nothing of him until he spoke at that banquet. We knew he was a basketball player. So just on a whim, we went up and asked him.”
Raveling, who died Sept. 1 at 88 years old, is a Hall of Famer who coached in college for more than 30 years and won Olympic gold as an assistant for Team USA. But this — an offer from a bunch of Delco kids — was how Raveling landed his first coaching gig.
Raveling had never coached before, but he told the boys he would help them in the fall of 1962 as long as their priest said OK.
“It was amazing,” Cawley said. “We were just dribbling the ball around in the gym, and here comes this mountain of a man.”
The coach — the boys called him “Mr. Raveling” — taught his CYO team how to full-court press and play 3-2 defense. They practiced three nights a week and played on Saturday and Sunday mornings against nearby Catholic schools like Sacred Heart, St. Bernadette, Our Mother of Good Counsel, and St. Joseph.
“We would walk into some gyms, and teams wouldn’t know what hit them because of the things he taught us,” Cawley said.
Raveling usually arrived to practice wearing a shirt and tie as he volunteered to coach St. Denis while working during the day for Sun Oil. He often brought friends like former Villanova teammate Hubie White and Villanova track star Frank Budd, who once was considered the world’s fastest man.
“He was very direct, but he was also very approachable,” Chris Tuner said. “He was so supportive, and he embraced us.”
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Raveling, who played at Villanova from 1957 to 1960, kept his playing career going as he coached St. Denis by playing on the weekend in the old Eastern Basketball Association. He brought the boys from Delco to Camden Convention Hall and arranged for them to play a game before his Camden Bullets squad played.
“We stayed for his game, and George was on the bench before he finally got in,” Cawley said. “He got three fouls on him in a short amount of time. The next Monday at practice we said, ‘Mr. Raveling, we didn’t know you were a hatchet man. You were kicking ass and taking names.’”
St. Denis’ biggest player was 5-foot-8 — “Our tallest guy was our skinniest guy,” Cawley said — but Raveling coached them to the championship game against St. Matthias from Bala Cynwyd. Raveling used his connections for the game to play at St. Joseph’s Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse. The gym was packed, and St. Denis hung with the bigger St. Matthias before losing by just a basket.
“He was a very charitable person,” Mike Druding said. “We asked him, and I guess he took the responsibility from there. He was super polite and never yelled at us during a scrimmage or made us run a lap for being late. He was a big imposing figure for 12- and 13-year-olds, but he was so polite.
“My dad would drive a few of us over to the game if it was on the road and then stick around. George Raveling treated my father as if he was part of the team.”
Raveling coached St. Denis for two seasons before returning to Villanova as an assistant. The boys from Havertown followed their coach’s career as he moved to Maryland, assisted two Olympic teams, and was the National Association of Basketball Coaches’ Coach of the Year in 1992 with Southern Cal.
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Druding reconnected with Raveling in 2015 after Raveling was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Their coach was praised for being a pioneer and remembered for being the guy who steered Michael Jordan to Nike and left the March on Washington with Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. First, he was their CYO coach in Havertown.
“We had a guy who became a doctor, Bobby Schuster. He was in seventh grade, and I remember Mr. Raveling saying, ‘If I ever have a son, I’d like him to be like Bobby Schuster,’” Cawley said. “We’re like ‘Whoa. What about us, Coach?’ He was just such a nice guy. He was a real gentleman and a good person.”
Raveling said the St. Denis guys were welcome to attend the Hall of Fame ceremony that summer in Springfield, Mass. The guys from Delco drove up, attended a breakfast with Lenny Wilkens, and found themselves at an after-party hosted by Nike founder Phil Knight.
Charles Barkley, Ralph Sampson, Nolan Richardson, and Lisa Leslie were at the party. So was Cawley, Turner, Druding, Schuster, and Paul Lang. The St. Denis guys blended in with the stars.
“I was getting a stiff neck looking up at all these guys,” Cawley said. “All of these super important people were coming up to us and saying, ‘It’s really great that you guys came up to this.’ We said, ‘Hey, this is an honor.’ He had a great influence on all of us.”
Raveling’s family said he died from cancer. The news hit hard for the boys from St. Denis. He was their coach, a pivotal figure at a pivotal time of their lives.
“We didn’t have other things to do,” Turner said. “We played basketball and then went down to the bowling alley and played pinball machines. All of this electronic media wasn’t there. Back in those times, we played basketball year-round.”
The boys played every day in Turner’s driveway — “The Sup Basketball League,” they called it — and played pickup at the court outside St. Denis — “The Pit” — against guys who went Division I.
They still call each other by the monikers they picked up back then, nicknames like “Sup” and “Bogs.” The game bonded a group of kids in the 1960s, which is why it’s easy to understand how they felt all these years later when their coach died.
Raveling molded the kids from Turner’s driveway into championship contenders, giving them memories to rehash 60 years later. Now in their 70s, the St. Denis guys are planning a get-together later this month in Avalon.
They’ll fly in from as far as California to hang out with the guys they grew up with in Delaware County. They can’t play like they used to, Druding said, but they sure can still talk about it.
“We’ll hoist one for Coach Rav,” Cawley said.
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