Monomoy Boys Basketball Hope To Make Statement With Effort, Energy

HARWICH – The nucleus to “The Book of Basketball,” the 2009 magnum opus of sportswriter Bill Simmons, is that basketball has a massive secret.

Simmons learns it, as he relays the story, from Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas, a two-time NBA champion in the 1980s and ‘90s with the Detroit Pistons. The secret of basketball, Thomas tells him at a Las Vegas poolside, is that it’s not about basketball. The secret to basketball is that talent alone doesn’t win games. 

The key instead is to value winning above all else. Teammates have to like each other. Players need to sacrifice individual statistics for the sake of the team. Everyone has to stay on the same page and commit to their roles.

That’s the secret. Ask Monomoy boys basketball head coach John McCarthy, and the team heading into the 2025-26 season may have some semblance of it.

“I'm really excited about, I think, what our team will be able to kind of bring as a full unit,” McCarthy said Saturday after the Sharks’ final scrimmage of the preseason. “It's not like we have a couple guys that are just like every night, ‘they're our guys.’ We have seven or eight guys that, when playing well together, are going to be a really fun team to watch and bring great energy.”

That teamwide composition differs from last year’s group, a Cape and Islands League-winning squad headlined by one or two elite seniors. This season’s players are hungry, McCarthy said, and create a possibly more all-around lineup. The Sharks are nearly all juniors and seniors, making for a team with good energy and great chemistry.

There’s the trio of senior guards in three-year varsity player Zach Martin, Liam Flood (“Just really excited about what he's going to bring — he's put so much time in the last two years,” McCarthy said) and Jean-Louis Marjollet (“Another kid that's coming in in fantastic shape, going to play both ends of the floor really well”). Then there’s the two 6-foot-3 forwards in senior Tyler Ayer (“Who can shoot, and [I’m] excited about seeing what he can do”) and junior Dez Wall (“Kind of point forward who can play outside, play inside”).

“We have a little bit of a mix of a lot, so it's going to be fun to see how kind of they work together,” McCarthy said.

With the Sharks being two-thirds seniors, many of those players have been around the team for a while but just haven’t yet received many minutes, so McCarthy expects positive steps to be taken as the season progresses. On a game scale, that’s been shown in Monomoy’s two preseason tri-scrimmages, the play improving as the quarters compile.

Monomoy just missed out on the Division 4 state tournament last season with a 7-13 record. They opened this season Tuesday (after The Chronicle’s deadline) at home against Martha’s Vineyard. Making a return to the playoffs for the first time since 2023-24, a year the Sharks reached the tournament’s second round, is a baseline goal to which the team is fully committed. There’s no question, McCarthy said, that they’re looking to make a statement.

“I'd be surprised, if with the effort and energy that we play with, if we're not going to be a team that some people are going to pay attention to,” he said.