Unique ‘twin bill’: College hoops coaches will face off for first time

This game was already scheduled.

As Ryan Van Zelst took over this year as head men’s basketball coach at Penn State Abington, there was this game to be played, a natural one with Arcadia, located less than five miles away in Glenside.

“We’re going to do it one time and get rid of it,” Ryan said of Tuesday night’s game, Penn State Abington hosting.

What’s the problem? Not a problem. Ryan just has a twin brother, Adam. They are as close as twins can be, both say, talking multiple times a day, often but not always about basketball.

Adam just happens to coach Arcadia.

As far as either school knows, this is a first in NCAA basketball, opposing twins facing off: Two Conwell-Egan High graduates from Levittown who played together at Albright College and coached a year together as Albright assistants, then saw their paths diverge. Adam is starting his fourth season in charge at Arcadia. Ryan had been working as a Scranton assistant when he got the Penn State Abington job.

» READ MORE: Jerry Stackhouse, once traded by the Sixers for Aaron McKie, faced McKie, as coach of Vanderbilt

Separate interviews with each ... call them equally funny.

Tuesday, one coach is going to come away feeling bad, and it might be the winning coach, feeling bad for the losing brother. At the same time, there’s probably no 2022-23 game that either brother will want to win more.

“I agree — that’s the catch,” Ryan said. “I know twins will always say they’re close. We’re very close. We both live in Conshohocken. I actually drive by Arcadia every single day. I stop by sometimes.”

Identical twins? Fraternal, although they look identical enough.

“There are two tells,” Adam said. “My brother has like a birthmark on his forehead. And I’m an inch taller. I used to comb my hair over …”

Talking on the phone, he paused.

“Wait, was it me or him?” Adam said. “One of us used to comb his hair over.”

Who’s older?

“I’m two minutes older,” said Adam, admitting he has reminded his brother of that every so often for the last 34 years. “That, and I’m a better basketball player. Two things he can’t get away from.”

Did they ever switch places? (It could work.) … Just for one high school class. One had religion, the other had math. They both remember it the same way, how classmates were in on it and giggled, but their teachers didn’t notice or much care.

“It kind of worked but it didn’t,” Ryan said.

Never did that in basketball?

“We never even thought about it,” Adam said. “We just wanted to win everything, and everything mattered.”

Glory days in hoops for them may have been CYO ball.

» READ MORE: Temple fully earned its court storming after upsetting Villanova ... this was big

“We both were this size in eighth grade,” Ryan said. “Everyone has their peak moment in basketball. I would say we peaked in eighth grade. We’re about 5-9. We made a run in the CYO tournament.”

“Everybody thinks you’re going to play D-I,” Adam said. “That’s what we thought.”

If Ryan thinks his peak was then, maybe Adam’s time was a bit later. He ended up being the one who started for a time at Albright. They both were recruited by Division III schools, but Albright was the only school that recruited them both. Their decision to go together, both said, was more about staying together, living together, than playing together.

“I played more as a sophomore [in high school], he played more in college,” Ryan said. “End of the day, no hard feelings. Looking back, being two 5-9 point guards going to the same school maybe was not ideal, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

“Playing together, it wasn’t going to happen,” Adam said. “Two 5-9 guards who are not that athletic.”

Adam was first to catch the coaching bug, then Ryan (two minutes younger) caught it. Both got together working basically as Albright graduate assistants for Rick Ferry, their own coach.

“Coach wanted to kill us — I don’t know how he managed it,” Ryan said. “We were young and crazy. It was fun, to be honest; it was so much fun, and we lived together. It was the last time we actually lived together. We grew a lot, bouncing X-and-O ideas off each other, ‘Coach, what about this?’ ”

“We shared an office,” Adam said. “There were days we would not speak for five or six hours, days we would argue all day, days we wouldn’t stop talking. We have the same interests, same group of friends. We want the same thing, try to do it the same way.”

Still, they acknowledged it could be a lot when you doubled such enthusiasm.

“During games, Coach would look over and tell us both to shut up sometimes,” Adam said.

By now, they’ve put in their time. Their senses of humor do seem matched. At this year’s first small college coaching luncheon, Ryan stood up and said, “This is hard. There’s a different animal to [being a head coach.] Can any of you still take an assistant?”

They’ve always gotten sideways looks on the recruiting trail, often sitting together, sometimes recruiting the same players.

“I know you’ve met my brother,” Ryan said about his standard line. “I’m the better-looking one, I’ve got the better personality.”

Do their teams play alike? When each was talking last week, he had seen the other’s squad play already, but that was more each just sitting there rooting for the other. Neither had really started scouting for what already goes down as the weirdest game of their careers.

“I haven’t watch watched him,” Ryan said. “But I would say, yeah, we probably do. We’re both emotional guys. Our teams represent that. We both want to get a good shot each time … ”

“We are very similar,” Adam said. “We both want to run motion with some rules, a lot of read-and-react. Pressing, with some junk matchup zone. So, yes, very similar.”

You can see for yourself Tuesday, since this game was already scheduled, now a twin bill of sorts.