Jimmy Reilly a natural successor to Herb Magee at Jefferson University

The punchy version of how Jimmy Reilly began working for Herb Magee as Jefferson University’s assistant men’s basketball coach, the banquet version, Reilly keeps it short and sweet.

“If it wasn’t for West Catholic, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be here,” Reilly said, meaning working at Jefferson at all, for 15 years as Magee’s assistant, and now in charge, taking over for a legend.

This isn’t coincidence: Reilly had gone to West Catholic. Magee had gone to West Catholic.

» READ MORE: Herb Magee's iconic journey ended last season.

“I was working for Corey Stitzel, the coach at the time at Neumann University,” Reilly said. “Corey was Coach’s former assistant.”

Coach, of course, was Magee.

“Corey called him and said, ‘I’ve got a guy for you, he’s perfect.’”

Magee would be the judge of that.

“Tell me about him. What’s his name?”

“Jimmy Reilly.”

Reilly, telling the story, interjects: “Irish kid, so that’s a big-time plus.”

Back to Magee asking questions.

“Where’d he go to high school?”

“West Catholic.”

“He’s hired.”

Now, Magee hired a lot of assistants over his 55 years in charge on Henry Avenue, and Reilly was a rare one who shared his high school alma mater. But this guy … Magee wasn’t looking to lose him. It’s been some years since Magee became convinced that when he was done, Reilly was the one who should take over.

For years, Reilly has been in charge of recruiting and scouting and a million other tasks, while merging basketball brains with Magee himself, no small thing when you’re talking about the second-winningest coach in NCAA history.

You sit down with Reilly, the words come out rapid-fire, but the tales have beginnings, middles and ends.

“If you’ve been around Jimmy Lynam and you’ve been around Jimmy Reilly, it’s like a clone,” said Reilly’s own West Catholic coach Bill Ludlow, now the coach at Archmere Academy in Delaware. “I really think that is one of the reasons there’s such a great comfortability with Herb. To me, it was Jimmy Lynam in another body.”

Lynam and Magee, backcourt mates at West Catholic, are best friends to this day. If there’s something to that, there’s also more to Reilly than maybe even meets the eye. He’s been through things, including an event that tore up the city, especially his Southwest Philly neighborhood, and most especially his own family. The event that Reilly insists he thinks about every day, to this day.

Reilly hasn’t just followed the stations of the coaching cross to get to his new spot. Although he didn’t really miss those, either.

“I tell this to young coaches all the time, when they come and ask advice,” Reilly said, sitting in a room just above the court at what, as of Tuesday’s home opener, is officially Herb Magee Arena. “I say the best advice I can give you is to start out as a D-III assistant. Their eyes get real big and they’re all like, what are you talking about? I say, ‘It’s very simple. You learn how to recruit. You learn how to recruit like 100 guys to get five. You’re on the phone every night building relationships. You’re out recruiting every single night. You get to know more people. When you start out at D-I, you’re recruiting like seven guys to get two. You’re not really developing relationships. You’re not really in your car to find gyms.’ I was out recruiting every single night, a couple of games a night, on the phone constantly.”

Reilly has a way about him … He’ll tell you what he learned from Magee, even though he’ll add that “it’s hard to ballpark 15 years,” but the equilibrium Magee kept for all those years, Reilly started there.

“Somebody would come up to him after a game, ‘Coach, you really played well tonight.’ … ‘Yeah, we made shots.’ He always kept it simple. Never panicked. Never let the kids see him panic.”

Somebody asks Reilly what Magee is like, he’ll tell them, “You’ll never meet anybody like Coach Magee.”

Part of what he meant, Reilly said, is when other people get asked to do something, even if they say, “Nah, I don’t want to do that,” they’ll probably end up doing it, especially if the person doing the asking is their boss or their spouse.

“Coach Magee says, ‘I’m not doing it,’ and that’s it. And everybody accepts it.”

If you expect Reilly to talk about Magee teaching shooting technique, he’s more likely to tell you about the time he got excited about a recruit, set up a visit, got the kid to campus, then had Magee there to meet him … until Magee saw the kid.

“He looks like a tool,” Magee told his assistant. “Tell them I’ve got a dentist appointment emergency and I’ve got to leave.”

And that was, in fact, it.

If Reilly can give his former boss the business a bit, he’s just as quickly telling it like it was about himself.

“I have a lot of regret,” Reilly said. “I’m not blaming this on Southwest Philly. But my buddies were into partying. I was into a partying. It never affected anything when basketball season was there. But in the summer when I should have been doing a lot of other stuff and putting in the work — I had to go to junior college for a reason.”

Two years at Manor, then two years at Ursinus. Some jobs he wasn’t that interested in, until coaching basketball fully grabbed him. Basketball had always grabbed him.

“He would come to my office at West,” Ludlow said. “He would want to know what we were doing that day. He would want to know the practice plan. He would always have little increments that he saw when he was playing. They were always right now. … He just was a terrific leader. It’s very cliché — he was a coach on the floor. The consummate point guard. He was that kid.”

More impressive when you know all that was going on with Reilly at the time …

“I don’t know if you were filled in on the blanks,” Ludlow said.

In fact, Reilly had filled them in, pain included.

“There’s two things I think about every day,” Reilly said. “I think of 10 million things every day. But two things, no matter what.” The second was how his career at West Catholic ended, losing by a point to Archbishop Carroll on a 15-foot banked turnaround jumper, the only one the Carroll center had probably taken in his life.

“I will never get over it,” Reilly said.

The first thing, every day, that’s one thing.

The other thing? “My cousin David, and what happened and what could be,” Reilly said.

When there’s a particularly violent incident that involves city youths, such as the killings after the Roxborough High JV football scrimmage — “it always triggers,” Reilly said.

Back to the summer of 1991. So many headlines. For instance: “Dream Dies a Violent Death … Ex-West Catholic star Reilly was about to enter trade school.”

David was Jimmy’s cousin, except, to Jimmy, he was so much more than that. Jimmy wanted to be David. He went to West Catholic because of David. He turned his focus to basketball because of David.

From that same Daily News story: “Reilly, 18, who played a prominent role last season for West Catholic High’s basketball team, was hacked to death with a meat cleaver early Saturday morning near his Southwest Philadelphia home.”

There had been escalating neighborhood tensions, Reilly said, between white kids and Vietnamese immigrants. It all culminated at McCreesh Playground.

“Something happened [an argument between the groups] earlier in the night, that David wasn’t involved in,” Jimmy Reilly said. “Now, I remember people judging my family and judging kids in the area. They were out late. It was [2:30] in the morning. They were sitting at the playground. They were drinking beers. A bunch of kids came down with bags. They dropped the bags, they take out meat cleavers, and they just start chasing everybody in the park. One of our buddies lost his ear. Another kid lost his finger. And then of course what happened to David …”

An Inquirer story related how David’s back had been turned when he got stabbed. Arrests were quickly made. The following year, three men were convicted of third-degree murder, three others also convicted of conspiracy to convict murder.

“Once this happened, my parents moved us out to Secane,” Jimmy said, and they wanted him to transfer to Cardinal O’Hara. No chance, he told them. He was going into his sophomore year at West. What he ended up doing, he said, was spending a lot of time living with David’s parents, who had also moved to another neighborhood in Southwest Philly. They had a bedroom for Jimmy.

“My uncle Dan, one of the best people I ever met in my life,” Jimmy said. “He coached everyone. Took everyone in the neighborhood camping every summer.”

At school, Jimmy said, amid all this tension, he’d listen to some classmates and friends using racial slurs.

“I’d sit there thinking, they didn’t do nothing — it’s not their fault,” Reilly said. “The bitterness of that neighborhood, it just totally changed. It was awful for a long time. I just remember the hatred that people had. It was crazy. I’m not saying I didn’t have it for a little bit.”

But his West Catholic teammates — different races, different neighborhoods, all so close. Everyone got to his house. You can’t wrap any of this with a bow. You can imagine alternate paths, Reilly unable to get over the murder of his role model. Could he really have gone into coaching if that bitterness had taken away his ability to see each person as an individual?

Reilly gives Ludlow tons of credit for all that.

“He taught me how, now that I’m a head coach, how I want to treat the guys,” Reilly said. “Like, you’ve got to love them unconditionally, no matter what. He did everything for us. He’d pick us up, take us to the gym, open up the gym anytime we wanted. … And when he needed to be tough — when he got mad at us, it was the worst feeling in the world. You didn’t want to let him down.”

Reilly had originally thought he wanted to get into broadcasting. He’d had an internship at WIP-AM, then took courses at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting. Then Channel 6 and NFL Films, “all like part-time small jobs. I was sending out my demo tapes, came really close to taking an on-air job in North Dakota.”

The whole time, in the back of his mind, he couldn’t let go of trying to coach. He called his old Major Junior College coach, Rich Casey, who called over to Neumann. They needed an assistant. Reilly worked a couple of sales jobs he hated. For his vacations, he took the entire two weeks for open recruiting period. He’d caught the bug. It never left him. He sees people looking to get out of coaching. His wife is a teacher. She has a tougher job, he said.

“Go pitch trash for a living — I did that,” Reilly said. “Go lay carpet for a summer. I did that, too. That’s hard. This isn’t hard.”

Even taking over for a legend.

“He’s one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet in your life,” Reilly said of his former boss. “What you see is what you get. He’s real.”

The new guy in charge on Henry Avenue, as real as it gets.

“Five minutes after I met him, I knew he was going to be a lifer,” said Ludlow, his old West Catholic coach.