Jan 7, 2019 3 min read

There might not be as much pickup basketball played in the Koroly driveway as there used to be but the impact remains.

The youngest of the three brothers, Michael Koroly, doesn’t need any reminders of what those games were like against older brothers Christian and Joey. Fouls were called only when someone was seriously hurt.

“Let’s just say, they’ve gotten the better of me from being older,” the Michael Koroly joked. “I’ll give that to them.”

Now, instead of trying to beat his older brothers, the junior guard is trying to be like them.

Christian was a standout at Trinity before graduating in 2013 and playing at Waynesburg University. Joey, a 4,000-yard running back in football and 1,000-point scorer in basketball, opted to play the former and is a freshman at Washington & Jefferson College.

Michael Koroly has continued to transition from sixth-man spot-up shooter – the role he filled on last year’s senior-dominated Trinity team – to a player who doesn’t come off the floor this season.

“The first couple of games into the season he was trying to carry us,” said Trinity coach Tim Tessmer. “That’s not who we are. That’s not who he is. He saw that once he got all five guys involved his opportunities would come.”

As Koroly has flourished, so have the Hillers.

After opening the season with four consecutive losses, Trinity (5-5) has won five of its last six games, including a pair of section wins over Montour and West Mifflin. In those first four losses, the Hillers averaged 51.5 points per game. Since then, that average has climbed to 61.2 points.

“I just expect to go out and get people involved, focused and ready to go,” Koroly said about a team that features all first-year starters. “I get going through them. It’s about getting in the gym first and working, showing them how to work. They have been doing the same. That’s why throughout the season we’ve gotten better and better.”

Koroly is one of the biggest reasons for the surge, which turned what could have snowballed into a forgettable season into a promising one. He is averaging 18.9 points, 3.3 assists and 6.4 rebounds per game, and making 42 percent of his three-point shots.

In Trinity’s 57-34 win over McGuffey on Saturday at the Chuckie Mahoney Classic held at Burgettstown, Koroly was the last of six players to score in the first quarter for Trinity. He finished with a game-high 18 points and seven rebounds.

“Everybody looks at us as Michael Koroly’s team,” Tessmer said. “He is the scorer and everything goes through him, but it’s more of a product of having pieces around him that can all score. If you leave our other guys open, they are going to hurt you. He brings the ball up the floor, facilitates the offense and can make shots. I don’t know of a kid in the area that puts in as much time as he does. We have to kick him out of the gym.”

Tessmer had to replace the clips on the shooting gun used by the Hillers because the amount of practice shots Koroly has taken over the past two years. It is a work ethic he has derived from his brothers, despite the driveway games becoming more and more sparse.

“My brothers have pushed me,” Koroly said. “There hasn’t been a game in a long time, but they were always physically demanding and wanting me to become a better player.”