Lucas Monroe is Drexel’s ‘glue guy,’ but the least interesting thing about him is basketball

There’s a running joke around the Drexel men’s basketball team centered on its transfer from Penn, Abington High grad Lucas Monroe, whom players on the team call “Unc.”

Sure, Unc is a nod to his age, but Monroe is one of three graduate students in Drexel’s starting lineup on a team that sits atop the Coastal Athletic Association standings. The joke isn’t that Monroe is older at 24, it’s that he lives a separate secret life away from the Dragons.

Which makes sense in some ways. The least interesting thing about Lucas Monroe is that Lucas Monroe plays basketball.

He can be seen walking around campus with his new guitar. His teammates sometimes think he’s off somewhere probably plucking Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” in a subway station. Sometimes Monroe, whose graduate program at Drexel is entirely online, will hop on a subway and head to a different part of the city to sit somewhere and read.

In the six or so months since Monroe was forced by Ivy League rules to leave one Division I basketball program for another three blocks away (dare you to find a transfer who traveled less distance), he has read about a dozen books. Monroe doesn’t like to be on his phone while he’s waiting for time to pass. So while his teammates spend time listening to music or scrolling social media on bus trips, Monroe is typically the only one with a book in his hands. Right now, he’s reading mystery novelist Walter Mosley, but his reading list this season has featured works from author and activist James Baldwin; Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water, set in Reconstruction-era Georgia; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (for a third time); and a second time through The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

There’s a theme here. Monroe is in a sports management program at Drexel, in part because basketball was supposed to, at one point, be his career. But his interests, cultivated through four years at Penn, lean more toward his undergraduate path: American politics and African American studies.

Monroe isn’t sure what life after basketball looks like yet, but he’s in the infantile stages of starting something right now. Along with Penn professor Brian Peterson, Monroe is beginning research on a project that studies the demographic makeup of AP and honors courses. They want to figure out how predominantly white schools are supporting non-white students and what racial literacy is like in those schools.

Monroe thought back recently to his time at Abington, where he said he was one of “three or four” Black students in an AP or honors class of around 30 students.

“It’s a predominantly white school, but it’s very diverse,” Monroe said.

“Either all the students of color are stupid or there’s some kind of systemic thing that’s keeping them from taking these classes. I refuse to believe that I was the only smart Black kid.”

» READ MORE: How golf balls and ‘the culture’ are impacting Drexel’s historic start to the CAA basketball season

Oh, right, Lucas Monroe plays basketball.

In a perfect world, Monroe would be working toward a graduate degree and playing his final college basketball season at Penn. But the Ivy League, archaic in some ways compared to its non-Ivy peers in modern-day, post-pandemic college hoops, would not allow players who graduated to play, even though the league canceled its 2020-21 season, due to COVID-19.

Monroe had options, but none of them were as close to home as Drexel. It was a perfect landing spot in many ways.

There are two ways to look at how Monroe has impacted Drexel’s 15-8 season and 8-2 start to the conference portion of it. There’s the stat line: 5.5 points and 5.1 rebounds per game. Yawn. But there’s also this: Monroe joined the starting lineup for a mid-December game vs. Albany, and in 13 games with Monroe as a starter, Drexel is 10-3.

“Lucas brings a maturity and experience,” Drexel coach Zach Spiker said. “He knows what’s going on. He understands how it’s played. What I had anticipated Lucas doing, he’s doing that and more. It’s not only just how he’s playing, but I think there’s a seasoned veteran element.”

In other words, a “glue guy,” two words in basketball that can be a slight or a compliment, depending on the receiver of the words. Monroe laughed a little when asked about how he takes it.

“There’s glue guys in the NBA making millions of dollars,” he said. “It’s not the worst thing.”

This was a player at Abington who, along with Villanova’s Eric Dixon, helped his high school team win three straight District 1 titles in three seasons as a captain. But Monroe got to Penn and was a role player for his first two seasons. He was a glue guy but didn’t know it.

“I think I came to that realization slower than I wanted to in undergrad,” Monroe said. “I knew what my game was. Everyone wants it to be more.”

Entering his senior season, he sized up the roster. There was one spot in the starting lineup, he figured, and it was up to him to figure out where the holes were and how to fill them. He could rebound, defend the other team’s best player, and play a de facto point guard role as a forward, and that enabled Monroe to carve out a starting role. He posted averages of 4.9 points and 6.0 rebounds per game last season at Penn and was the team’s only captain.

The transition to Drexel has been pretty easy, not just because he only had to move a few blocks away — housing is now free in Monroe’s post-Ivy world — but because Spiker worked for Penn coach Steve Donahue at Cornell. They run some of the same plays with minor alterations.

A Drexel team ready to take the next step has found a perfect complement to its skill set in Monroe, and it works for him, too.

“I’m used to, ‘OK maybe this might be a game where I’m not going to get that many shots, but maybe I can just go in and rebound and I can cut, and keep the ball moving on offense,’ ” he said. “Every game kind of calls for something different. I take pride in it, being a glue guy.”

In Drexel’s first-ever Big 5 win, the end of the game called for Monroe’s defense and toughness. He wasn’t a starter yet, but he was on the floor in the closing seconds, walling up Villanova’s Justin Moore before Moore’s shot was swatted by Drexel’s Amari Williams.

Monroe got a text from Dixon after the game. Congratulations, sure, but also a reminder, jokingly, that Dixon beat him three times. Monroe, however, has the last laugh.

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At Penn, Monroe was teammates and friends with Jelani Williams, who continued his activism at Howard University.

In 2020, Kyle Williams, Jelani’s father, launched A Long Talk About the Uncomfortable Truth, an organization that aims to teach anti-racism through productive conversation. Monroe has interned with the group.

It’s work like that, blending Monroe’s activism urges and his intellect, that Monroe seems more likely to pursue once this school year ends. He’s thinking about moving to Washington to be at the center of it all.

Physically, Monroe said, he thinks he can play professionally overseas. But it’s a tough life. There’s a reason he didn’t end up playing college basketball this year on the other side of the country in a place he didn’t want to live.

“Basketball has to really be your happy place to go overseas and be by yourself in a new world,” Monroe said.

“Basketball is not as comforting for me as it used to be. I love it so much and my goal is to make it to the NCAA Tournament, I want to win the CAA. But I’m also self-aware that it could possibly drive me crazy if I went to another country. I don’t know if it would make me as happy as I could be.

“I thought that I was going to be involved with basketball for my entire life when I was younger. Then I realized, maybe I have other things I can bring to the world.”

A schedule that’s less busy at Drexel than it was at Penn has allowed Monroe to explore his other curiosities. He keeps a running document on his computer where he writes “mini-essays, rants, poems, a sad thought, a happy thought, little random bursts of inspiration.”

Monroe, however, said he wishes he was more artistically gifted.

“I feel like if I was a different person, in a different life, I would want to be someone that brought beauty into the world, like art or music,” Monroe said. “That’s why I’m learning the guitar. I think those things are cool. Being a great orator or being a great poet, where you can write something and bring tears to someone’s eyes, or make someone think about a loved one, I think that’s pretty cool.”