Jumari Glover does a little bit of everything for the Bordentown Regional High School boys basketball team.
In his first year of varsity play, the Scotties junior is starting and fourth on the team in scoring with the ability to shoot the 3-pointer or score inside, fourth in rebounding, third in assists, third in blocks, all while covering the opposing team’s best offensive option and balancing handling the ball some and playing forward some.
“He doesn’t score a lot of points but he’s like my Swiss Army knife,” said Bordentown coach Steve Perry.
The metaphor extends to Glover athletically. He’s not just playing basketball year-round. His first love is football, which he hopes to play in college in two years. He was a defensive back and wide receiver for the football team that went 7-2 and finished second in the West Jersey Football League National Division and reeled off seven straight wins. In the spring, he’ll rejoin the Scotties track and field program. It all goes hand in hand.
“I started track just as a way to stay in shape,” Glover said. “But as I started to do it, it became more special to me. And basketball, I’ve been playing since I was young. Football, it was my number one sport. But it means a lot. It keeps me in shape all year-round. It keeps me as a good athlete. I’m playing defense. You’ve got to have stamina. You’re guarding a guy backwards, so it’s not easy.”
Glover takes something away from each sport. They help him competitively and athletically. He felt it this fall in football season.
“I felt this football season, I had a pretty good year,” Glover said. “I really noticed that speed, I was faster than previous years. That was one thing that I needed. Even though I’m tall, I have the perfect size, I felt like my acceleration speed was just a little down. Track answered that.”
Now Glover is enjoying his first season of varsity basketball for a team that’s loaded with junior talent. Last year, he was on the junior varsity and toward the end of the season, Perry could see his confidence growing.
“I wasn’t always a big basketball guy, but last year, I saw I can stand with these guys,” Glover said. “There’s no one too, too better than me. So I just had a warm up to it. And I felt like that was the case for this year, that in the beginning of the season I wasn’t really taking shots that I should have been taking. But now it feels like I got all the confidence in the world.”
Glover and the Scotties are showing improvements though the record isn’t quite what they’d want. They started the season 4-9, but mixed in are heartbreaking two-point losses to Burlington Township, a one-point loss to Pennsauken and another two-point loss to an 8-2 KIPP Academy team.
It’s a team that is adjusting to bigger roles at the varsity level, and they’re likely going to be a lot better over the second half of the season.
“We’ve been playing good basketball lately,” Perry said. “We had a really good game against Northern Burlington, who was kind of on a hot streak, and was able to get a win against them. Against KIPP, they’ve won I think seven in a row or so, and they took them down to the wire. So, our guys, they play really hard.
“They like the competition. They play well towards their competition and give every team we see on the floor, they give it their all.”
They have a stellar scorer in Chase Martin. He’s their leading rebounder as well with Orion Innocent just behind. Idris Spriggs is tops in assists and Jared Benton, Jose Santiago and Jayden Florence all contribute. They’re all juniors, and the Scotties start five juniors.
“They kind of have good synergy,” Perry said. “They kind of know each other, they root for each other. We do kind of have an alpha in Chase, but he’s a really good team player, and everybody roots for everybody, so there’s that part of it that they play well together.”
And that’s without Ryan Fryc, another junior who was lost to a broken ankle. He would have given the Scotties some more outside shooting help and some experience. Martin was the lone returning starter.
“We’re all young,” Glover said. “We’ve been playing with each other for a very long time, since middle school, elementary school. So even though the record isn’t as good as it is, this is just a development year.”
AJ Williams, Henry Tober and James Stmetzki are the only seniors on the roster. Bordentown has had to rely on the juniors to bolster their depth, and Glover has been a good fit. His versatility is a big plus on a team that’s looking for contributions across the board.
“I usually put him on the other team’s best offensive guy when we’re playing man-to-man, and he rebounds really well, he can swing between, he’s more of a forward, but he can play some big, he can play some guard, he can handle the ball a little bit.”
With each game, Glover’s confidence has grown as he’s gotten more comfortable in the starting lineup and finding his role. He came into the season without any big expectations, just hoping that he’d have a chance to help the team with anything he could bring.
“Just the effort, just making plays 100 miles per hour, making the best plays for my guys, getting the guys open, feeding the people we know that need to score, just not making too many mistakes,” said Glover. He’s picked up on how to do so at the varsity level, which he’s found to be more team-oriented than the JV level.
What he relishes most is the chance to lock down an opposing offensive star. Glover has gotten accustomed to drawing a tough defensive assignment.
“I love it,” he said. “It just shows that he has trust in me because he knows that I can deliver and if we need a stop or I need to lock a person down, I’m the guy to go to. So I just love that.”
Glover studies opposing players on film. He looks for tendencies and how he can make life difficult.
“I just see what they do best at and I try to make them do something else,” he said. “If they go to the rim, I try to maybe let them shoot the ball and let them put up shots, and if they are shooters, I just got to deny them and maybe get the ball in their hands and let them go to the rim and trust my help defense.”
It all starts with defense for Glover. It’s no coincidence he also loves playing defensive back on the gridiron. He’ll take the open shot, but he doesn’t need to score to feel important to the basketball team.
“Everyone has their role, and my role in the starting five starts on the defensive side of the ball,” he said. “And once we get a couple of stops and me and my guys score, it seems like we got all the energy we need.”
The Scotties are building chemistry through their season together and they’re gaining confidence in how each of them can help the team be successful. That’s going to serve them well when next year rolls around. Glover is part of a class that is used to winning. That’s all they’ve done on the football field, and he’s hoping to help that extend to the basketball season. Bordentown has had trouble finishing off good starts and that’s the focus as they try to finish the season strong and learn from their earlier games.
“We just made some small mistakes, but we were right there, lost by two,” said Glover of the KIPP game. “So coming out more aggressive and keep hooping in the second half is something big to keep doing.”
Jumari Glover has taken on a significant role for a young Bordentown basketball team.,
