Bensalem High School’s Leo Vincent averaged 17 points per game for the Owls this winter.
By Mike Gibson
For the Wire
To say Leo Vincent is soft-spoken might be an understatement, but his game is very loud on the basketball court.
“He’s the type of kid who doesn’t say a lot, but he opens up when he really gets to know you,” said Anthony Latina, his future coach at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.
Vincent said plenty without opening his mouth in perhaps the most prestigious post-season tournament for high school basketball players on the East Coast earlier this month.
If you enjoy high school basketball in general and college recruiting in particular, chances are you have heard of the Albert C. Donofrio Tournament in Conshohocken.
That town becomes the capital of East Coast basketball for much of late March through mid-April, pairing all of the big high school stars on various teams.
Reputations are both made and tarnished in that town.
Bensalem’s Vincent both made and enhanced his reputation by quite a bit.
He scored 32 points for the LVBR (Lehigh Valley Basketball Rankings) team in its lone loss in the single-elimination tournament to I-3, the eventual champions. I-3, a team named for former Sixer Allen Iverson, won its fifth-straight title in the tournament, but no team gave them a better game than Vincent’s LVBR squad.
LVBR led for most of the game before falling, 72–67, but Vincent more than did his part. He was named to the all-tournament team.
“After I hit a couple shots, I definitely got into a feel for the game,” said Vincent, who averaged 17 points a game for the Owls during the high school season. “I-3 beat me the last three years, but this was the game I thought we had. I hit some shots and we got off to a good start, but we didn’t finish.”
Vincent’s team led until there was 1 minute, 53 seconds left when the I-3 team took advantage of its superior size to pound the ball inside.
“I-3 is the league powerhouse,” said Josh Verlin, editor and founder of Cityofbasketballlove.com, which covered the tournament on a daily basis. “They were started by an old buddy of Allen Iverson, a business manager, and they get all of the good players or at least most of them.
“So what LVBR and Leo Vincent was able to do against them was very impressive. He’s certainly a kid who can come into the college level and play right away.”
Vincent, who picked Sacred Heart over suitors like Hofstra and Robert Morris, proved that he is a high-value recruit for Latina.
“We were on Leo from the beginning of the recruitment progress,” Latina said. “We saw him in a tournament in King of Prussia and he had a terrific game and then saw him a couple of more times during the summer and then we thought we really wanted to go after him.
“We went to Bensalem games a bunch of times and one of the things we really liked about him was that he could score the basketball and he had a swagger, a good swagger, about him.
“What I mean by that is that you like to see a player who has the confidence to score against anyone and to take the big shot at any time and Leo had that and we could see that he made a lot of those big shots.”
Latina said that Vincent could either fit in right away at Sacred Heart as a point guard or shooting guard and has the ball-handling and shooting skills to easily interchange between both positions.
“He has a good feel for the game and makes good decisions and I really felt his game translates well to the next level,” he said. “When he goes against the bigger players, you could see he’s a little more motivated in a game like that and he’s got a little more to prove and he always comes up big in those kind of situations.
“That’s good for us because we’re going to be playing a lot of guys like that. We’re big believers in production. Reputation has never won a game and we look for a lot of players who are productive and Leo certainly fits that profile.”
Latina said that Sacred Heart doesn’t back down from anyone in its scheduling approach and proof of that is it will be playing Florida Gulf Coast next season in the non-league portion of its schedule. FGCU was one of the Cinderella teams of the NCAA Tournament this year.
“He’ll probably play point guard for them,” Bensalem coach John Mullin said. “I didn’t see his game in the Conshohocken tournament, but I heard about it. He’s a good three-point shooter who can drive to the basket and can dribble the ball well. I think he’ll do fine at the next level.”
Vincent plans to do his part to make the most of the opportunity.
“They showed a tremendous amount of interest right from the start,” he said of Sacred Heart. “They have a great coaching staff. I’m looking to make the most of the scholarship.”
Just like he made the most of his most recent appearance on a large stage.
