Mekhi Clemons remembered as a special person within Rosemont College’s basketball program

A bunch of current players have stopped by the Rosemont College men’s basketball office over the past week, essentially to pay their respects. One of them is gone. Mekhi Clemons, Rosemont class of 2018. These players didn’t know Clemons, but they wanted to know about him.

“You don’t remember the time you see most people for the first time,” said Rosemont coach Bob Hughes. “At least I don’t. I see so many young people. I remember meeting him because he was so overwhelmed that we were there to recruit him. That little spark of joy.”

Sure enough, everyone got lucky in the deal.

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“He wouldn’t have been recruited by anyone if my assistant hadn’t stumbled upon him,” Hughes said.

That assistant, Brian Hardy, was at Rosemont for only one season. He wasn’t even at the gym to see Perkiomen Valley, Mekhi’s high school. He was recruiting a couple of players on the other team. But this guard, not even 6 feet tall, there was something about the way he carried himself. Hardy passed the name to Hughes, who remembers a random weekend day when there was time to get to a Perkiomen Valley game before a higher-priority game later in the day.

“Most of my evaluations were just of him dunking the ball in warmups and at halftime,” Hughes said. “We listed him at 6 feet, but he was 5-10½. The most athletic guy we’ve ever had in our program.”

He turned into a lockdown defender, eventually the best on the team. He led the team in scoring with 15 points a game as a senior.

“I don’t think he applied anywhere else to college,” Hughes said. “His plan was to not go to college.”

He waited his turn at Division III Rosemont, going from barely playing to reserve to backup to all-conference second team (should have been first-team, Hughes said). Hughes noted on Twitter how Clemons “hit two of the biggest shots in our program’s history.”

Still, all that wasn’t why Clemons’ death last week in a dirt bike accident was so crushing. It was that joy. Clemons, age 26 when he died, never lost it. Graduated in four years, leaving memories everywhere he’d walked.

“He made me take this class with him,” said former teammate Ryan McGee, now a Jefferson University assistant.

The class was History of Philadelphia.

“It’s still pretty hard for me to talk about Mekhi without crying,” texted the professor of that class, Michelle Moravec, in response to an interview request. “So I’m going to text you.”

Moravec, who became Clemons’ adviser as he majored in history, texted about his commitment to social justice and how he believed studying the past could offer insights into a possible better future, how Mekhi appreciated the power athletes had to bring attention to political causes, how Mekhi himself shared his talents with so many people.

“This sounds very stuffy,” Moravec then texted. “And Mekhi was not like that at all.”

“His freshman year, he struggled in the classroom, in the dorms, on the court at times,” Hughes said. “He didn’t have a great basketball IQ at first. He had this raw athleticism.”

Former Ursinus College star Dennis Stanton was running a camp, looking for counselors, and reached out to local coaches. Hughes recommended Clemons.

“Mekhi started working for Dennis, has worked for him ever since,” Hughes said. “Dennis was one of the first people to call. He said Mekhi was one of the counselors the kids always wanted to play for.”

More than that, Hughes said, Mekhi himself “was like a sponge. Once he started doing reps, he would just take to it. He had a big poster on the back of his dorm room door, he would write his reps. He would come in for 90 minutes and just do form shooting by himself. Working with Dennis really helped him.”

“He didn’t necessarily have a position,” said McGee, who played in men’s leagues with Clemons after graduation. “He was just a basketball player. That’s what he was.”

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Getting that Rosemont program up and running under Hughes, McGee said, “we helped change the culture. He was a huge part of that. We just all loved being around each other. ‘When are we going to lunch? Where are we going for dinner?’ He was just being himself and you’d be dying laughing.”

Being on the motorcycle … Hughes used to get on him about that.

“He loved the bike life,” McGee said. “He knew what it was. He did what he wanted to do.”

“He went to pop a wheelie, and came out from under it,” Hughes said. “I don’t know if he hit a pole or a tree or a car. There was his internal bleeding. His kidneys failed.”

He reportedly crashed into a tree on North Broad Street, traveling with other riders near Temple’s campus.

As soon as he heard, Hughes said, “I didn’t know I had that many tears.”

Mekhi Clemons was “never supposed to be an all-conference player at this level — he just made himself into something,” the coach said. “You talk about the maturation process. He was a living example of it. A shining example.”

He’d become a father, adding joy to his own life. He’d earned a master’s degree in secondary education from Grand Canyon University and was teaching eighth grade at Stetson Charter School in Philadelphia.

That positive energy, Hughes said, remained contagious. The joy Mekhi spread lingers still.