Plymouth Whitemarsh senior Andre Mitchell will continue his basketball career at Catholic University. A three-year starter for the Colonials, Mitchell was twice named first team All-SOL American Conference. He was a two-year team captain and averaged 15.4 points and 4.8 assists per game this past season in leading PW to the PIAA Class AAAA Elite Eight. Mitchell scored 1,000 career points.
Coach Jim Donofrio says: “Andre Mitchell is easily is one of my favorite guys to have coached. He made himself a player. Andre was possibly going to be the football quarterback, and after his ninth grade year, he was struggling – what should I do? He decided he was going to commit to basketball. Both his father and I said – you’re going to really have to work at this. It didn’t come that naturally to him, and he’s proof that if you can commit to something, you can really improve at it. He didn’t even have a natural left handed layup down until his junior year, and there was a moment in the district semis against Ridley this season when in a key moment in the first half, he went full bore, passed three guys and scored on their big guy. I chuckled to myself and said, ‘What a great example of work ethic. He would not have done that even as a junior at that speed.’ He grew into the game.
“The term leadership gets thrown around a lot in high school, but I don’t think there are many kids who are really mature enough to know what it means, and yet Andre Mitchell was without a doubt one of the top leaders I have ever coached. As a 17-year-old kid, he was the classic example of the coach-on-the-floor guy, but he was more than that. He had the guts to close the locker room doors and say, ‘Here’s what is going on. Here’s what we want.’ He was an organizer. You could text him and say ‘Practice is at nine,’ and he’d say, ‘I got it coach,’ and he’d tell everybody. A lot of the kids don’t talk to each other as much as you’d think, and you have to teach the concept of what a true team is, and Andre made that so much easier. This season was a good old-fashioned throwback example of what a true team should be, and Andre gets a ton of credit for that.”
About Andre Mitchell and Jimmy Murray:
Coach Jim Donofrio says: “It was just a thrill coaching them for three years each because they really were the classic example of all the great clichés. They represented the school so well, and they were so proud to play for PW. They’re just so humble, and they had so many friends, and they were a major reason why we had such a following.
“It was a homegrown team in so many ways, and those guys were so well liked in the building. Our athletic director, Charlie Foster, has been around for a long time, and he gets so excited when we get into the state playoffs because your building is excited. We sold 800 student tickets each game. It was amazing. We had to keep asking for more tickets. A lot of that is a credit to Andre and Jimmy and just how well liked they were in the building. People don’t realize how important that is. You could have a great team, but if the kids are aloof or they’re a little disconnected, you can tell, but these were kids who had a lot of classmates they grew up with since elementary school, and it showed. That’s why it was such a fun team to coach.
“To see them both go on and play basketball in college and have the kind of high school careers they had - I was just so happy for them after our junior run where we lost early and missed the states. They really responded with a chip-on-the-shoulder mentality.
“When you get around people that buy into what you’re trying to do, it makes everything seem more alive. I’ve been spoiled by a lot of teams that have been like that, and this team was way up there, maybe more so than any I ever had. These guys were focused, they were mature, and they worked their butts off. It was just pure fun. They made it fun, and they also made you stop and say, ‘This is why I do this.’ You’re spoiled when you have those kinds of kids. How coachable they were was by the textbook, and that set the tone for everybody else. They’d take all the heat, they’d take the criticism, they’d take the compliments with humility, and they just enjoyed the moment. You have to sell that to a lot of people every year, but not to those two. That was ready made, and it’s a compliment to both sets of parents. I can’t wait to see how they grow and evolve. I think they’re going to be success stories no matter what they do.”
Photo provided courtesy of Dave Sherman. Seated (L-R): Robin Mitchell, Andre Mitchell and Marlo Mitchell. Standing: PW head coach Jim Donofrio.
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