And the other was this spring, when he left the Scarlet Knights’ program to join the Dayton Flyers for the upcoming season.
Actually, though, there was a third exit in Jordan Derkack’s past and it ruffled more feathers than the other two portal passages combined.
“From what I’ve seen from the old VCR recordings and all that, when I was real little, I always was holding something – whether it was a ball or a stuffed animal,” Derkack said with a growing smile as we sat and talked in a deserted office of the Cronin Center Thursday afternoon.
“And every time it seemed like I’d slam whatever I was holding to the floor and just be aggressive.”
That attitude carried over to one of his very first basketball outings.
He was just four years old.
“My dad tells a story how he brought me to this YMCA one day to play with a bunch of kids on a two-foot rim,” he said. “But right away I’m catching the ball and dunking it and yelling at people when I did. It was way too much for the other kids. I was being too aggressive.”
From their home in New Jersey, Friday, Gene Derkack remembered that day his young son turned into the Incredible Hulk of hoops:
“They had those little plastic baskets, and the other kids were just playing nicely. And then he goes in and starts dunking on people and flexing on the kids. It was way too competitive for them. All the kids had shocked looks on their faces.”
That put Jordan in the preschool portal:
“We had to leave that YMCA and we didn’t come back!” he said.
The recollection made him laugh and make an admission.
While the rims have gotten higher now, his temperament is pretty much the same.
The 6-foot-5 senior guard has been on the UD campus just about a month and his old YMCA ways have resurfaced when he and some of the other UD players have played pickup games on their own and had a 5-on-5 matchup a few nights ago in the Cronin practice gym.
It may have been meant as just a get-acquainted ice breaker for the portal-reconfigured Flyers – five transfers have been added to the roster as have two freshmen – but Jordan was his old wound-tight self.
He was chasing down loose balls, diving on the floor, vocal and intense.
He often plays like an end-of-the-bench exile finally invited onto the court, not the accomplished veteran who was the Northeast Conference Player of the Year and the league’s Defensive Player of the Year two seasons ago at Merrimack College and the guy who, last year at Rutgers, scored 26 on Michigan State and 16 in a victory over Notre Dame.
“Some guys can play ‘cool’ and be really good,” he said. “I envy those type of guys. I wish I could go out there and wiggle and be good.
“But I can’t do that. I’ve got to go out there and give full energy, full effort. I’ve got a lot of fire and even when we play open runs, I’m diving on the floor for loose balls. I love playing hard. It’s part of who I am, who I’ve been.”
Some of it comes from past slights.
“I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder, and I keep that chip,” he said.
“I was the player of the year in my conference, but I had zero scholarship offers. After that I went to prep school (SPIRE Academy in Geneva, Ohio) for a year and still ended up with just two Division I offers, St. Francis (Pennsylvania) and Merrimack.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“I’d written endless letters to coaches hoping they’d be interested and I’ve kept the ones I got in return – the ones that said, ‘Hey, we’ll get back to you.’ I put them on the front of my locker. I used that as fuel.”
Much of the rest of his aggressive approach is rooted in the family tree.
Gene, a 6-foot-6 forward who scored 1,146 points at Florida International University in Miami and, as Jordan described him to New Jersey sportswriter Guy Cupp a few years ago: “He was a bruiser, man.”
But Gene claimed his wife Jenny – an All-American high school soccer player in St. Louis who became an all-conference force at Florida International – is most responsible for their son’s approach:
“That non-stop mentality, that dog in him, it comes because of her. She tore her ACL twice in her career – once in high school, once in college – and fought back from both.
“She’s the best athlete in our house.”
And that’s saying a lot.
Like Mom, Pop and big brother, Jordan’s two younger siblings are both talented athletes themselves.
His sister Taylor, a 6-foot guard, is the all-time girls’ basketball scorer at Colonia High. She finished with 2,082 points, and will play for UMass this season after redshirting with a torn ACL last year.
And Jordan’s younger brother Aiden is a 6-foot-6 senior, Top 75 recruit at Colonia High.
Dayton has offered him a scholarship, as have several schools including Notre Dame, Xavier, Villanova, Creighton, Rutgers, TCU and the Miami Hurricanes.
Jordan said his parents set the tone for their three kids:
“We started early. The first thing I can remember athletically is running races – doing 5Ks and mile runs with my parents. The whole thing with them was once you started the race, you had to finish it. You could walk, but you couldn’t stop.
“I remember being 4 or 5 and I’d be running, trying to catch up from behind them.
“The other thing they stressed was that you gave it everything you got.”
As Gene explained: “We wanted them to learn early on, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”
Finding a connection
Gene said COVID played a big part in his son’s under-recruitment. Jordan’s junior season was cut short by the pandemic shutdown and his senior campaign was played in closed gyms with no fans.
“He was also a little bit of a late bloomer in terms of size and weight,” Gene said.
Jordan went from a 5-foot-8 sophomore in high school to a 6-foot-3 senior.
He said the lone invite he did get after his senior season came in July from Marist, who wanted him to first sit out a year:
“I remember telling my dad, ‘I don’t want to do that.’
“At that point I had nothing else, and my dad said, ‘What are you talking about? This is your only school.’
“But I wanted to play and I figured if I got one more year in prep school, I’d get bigger and stronger.”
Gene said his son bet on himself: “He always felt ‘I have something bigger and better out there and I’m going to go for it.’”
When he got to Merrimack for the 2022-23 season, he joined fellow freshman Javon Bennett, who entered the portal after the year and now is about to start his third season as a Flyer.
The season they were together at Merrimack, both started a majority of the games – Bennett 29 of 34 and Derkack 20 – and they forged some chemistry.
“We played a zone the entire time and we had this thing going where I’d cut off the guy with the ball and as he spun around, Von was there. He’s a little guy and he’d be trying their shoes already. He’d take the ball from them and be gone,” Jordan said. Bennett led the nation in steals that season and was named the Northeast Conference Rookie of the Year.
The Warriors won the NEC regular season title and the conference tournament, but weren’t eligible to play in the NCAA Tournament because the school hadn’t completed the provisional period for moving up from Division II to Division I.
The following season Jordan blossomed into a Merrimack star with games like the one at Long Island University when he scored 34 points, had 11 assists, 10 rebounds and five steals.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
He averaged 17.7 points per game that season and won the NEC’s top honors.
When he entered the portal, he said some 200 schools reached out to him:
“Some were schools I’d written to out of high school, and I had their (rejection) letter up on my locker. So I was like, ‘OK, no thanks. I’m good.’”
He chose Rutgers – 20 minutes from his Colonia, N.J. hometown – but saw his playing time reduced. He started 10 of 31 games and averaged 5.7 ppg.
Seeking a bigger role and more playing time, he entered the portal again.
He said some 100 colleges reached out again, but this time he had an agent who helped buffer the contact he received.
UD assistant Ricardo Greer did manage to reach him directly on his cell phone. A zoom call with head coach Anthony Grant followed, after which he and his parents were invited to visit the school. They did after first visiting Saint Louis, which is Jenny’s hometown and where one of Jordan’s former Merrimack coaches is now an assistant on Josh Schertz’s staff.
But once Jordan got to Dayton, he and his parents found more connections than he imagined.
Six degrees of separation
“They say there’s six degrees of separation between everyone and we found out we had a lot in common,” Grant said.
Grant already knew of Jordan. He had seen him play when the Flyers were recruiting Bennett.
And Jordan knew of the Flyers because he used to watch many of their games so he could follow Bennett.
But a deeper connection came when Grant discovered his former coach at Miami Senior High in Florida and the best man in his wedding – the late and much beloved Shakey Rodriguez – had coached Gene Derkack at FIU,
“I was Shakey’s first recruit out of high school and he has a pretty special place in my heart,” said Gene, who grew up in Queens, New York.
He ended up starting as a freshman at FIU and had a stellar career.
That’s also where he met Jenny Lieb, a soccer standout for the Panthers and his future wife.
Lieb’s roommate was another soccer stalwart, Cindy Greenman, and she ended up marrying Gene’s roommate and best friend, Raja Bell, who starred at FIU and went on to play 13 seasons in the NBA.
Bell has seen many of Jordan’s games over the years and highly praised his skills and basketball IQ last year when he spoke to Brian Fonseca of NJ Advance Media.
Brandin Knight, Rutgers’ associate head coach who played with Greer at Pitt, gave a glowing review of Jordan, as well.
And there was the connection with Bennett.
“Jordan is a great guy,” Bennett said. “We were good together. We had good chemistry on and off the court.”
And then there was the way UD fans and the Dayton community rally around the Flyers.
While he’s never been to a game at UD Arena, Jordan’s heard about the atmosphere – and can’t wait to experience the high-decibel embrace of the sold-out crowd game after game.
“It’s the first thing everybody asks: ‘Have you been to a game?’” he said.
Gene and Jenny will be dividing their hoops attention, between Jordan, who Grant said could fit into a leadership role; Taylor, who’s healthy again at UMass; and Aiden, who’s entering his final prep season in the swirl of college recruiters.
“We roll pretty deep as a family,” Gene said. “We’re pretty passionate about all our kids. My brother, my sister, my wife’s family, we all travel.
“Going to games this year will be really hard with all three kids playing, but we’ll make it work.”
“I know I can’t wait until Dayton opens November 3 against Canisius.”
Jordan feels the same:
“It’s crazy it’s taken me this long – this is my third school now – but this is my last year, and I feel good about this.”
One thing’s for sure, if he plays aggressively and dunks and leaves the guys he’s playing against with shocked looks on their faces, he’s not going to be shown the door.
“Finally, I think he has the right fit,” Gene said.
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