Ciarlo Liples is paralyzed below his hips. He has become a ‘li’l bro’ to La Salle’s men’s basketball team

At 10:19 on Sunday morning, five La Salle men’s basketball players walked into the gym at the Mayfair Community Center. It was not filled with the sounds you normally hear during a game. There were no sneakers squeaking, no feet shuffling on the court.

They found assistant coach Mike Doyle, graduate assistant Nick Lorensen, and head coach Fran Dunphy, and stood on the sidelines. The group was there for the 27th annual Katie Kirlin junior wheelchair basketball tournament but was focused on just one player: 14-year-old Ciarlo Liples.

Since 2023, Liples has been part of La Salle’s team. He sits on the bench for almost every home game. He lines up for the national anthem with the rest of the players. He goes into the locker room at halftime, rolls out with the team after the break, and joins the Explorers in huddles during timeouts.

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The teenager has observed countless hours of La Salle basketball, so last weekend, his teammates decided to pay it forward. For the next 40 minutes, they treated Liples’ game with the intensity of one of their own.

They counted down the shot clock while opposing players were shooting. They cheered “WE OUT,” ahead of every fast break, and “DE-FENSE” whenever Liples was guarding a ballhandler.

In the third quarter, Liples lobbed a pass to one of his teammates, who sank a shot. On the next possession, he set a pick for another teammate, who scored.

Junior guard Andrés Marrero pointed at the teenager.

“That was you,” he yelled. “That was Ciarlo’s screen.”

A few minutes later, one of Liples’ teammates sank a two-pointer to give his team, Katie’s Komets, a 27-26 lead. The La Salle players began to twirl their fingers in the air.

Guard Corey McKeithan turned toward one of the referees.

“That’s a three!” he shouted. “Review it!”

Dunphy watched quietly next to Doyle a few feet away. The head coach has been busy lately, having recently announced that he’ll be retiring from basketball at the end of the season after racking up 623 collegiate wins over 33 seasons.

There has been a lot of hoopla around this — much to Dunphy’s chagrin — but on Sunday, all of that attention dissipated. This was Liples’ world, and the coach was happy to be in it.

“Our guys are so stinking spoiled,” Dunphy said. “I’m spoiled. I’ve never had to do anything like this. And you see him, and he never complains. He just goes ahead and does his thing. He rebounds for them; he’s in the locker room encouraging them. This is the least we can do.”

McKeithan agreed.

“He’s at all our games,” the guard said. “So we show up for him. That’s my li’l bro.”

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In August 2023, Doyle received an email from the Penn men’s coach Steve Donahue, who was reaching out on behalf of Team IMPACT, a nonprofit that pairs children with disabilities and serious illnesses with college sports programs.

They were looking for a place to match Liples, a seventh grader who was born with spina bifida. Donahue thought La Salle could be a good fit.

Liples is paralyzed below his hips. At the time, he had undergone more than a dozen surgeries and required at least two hours of medical interventions every day. He saw 10 specialists, not including his pediatrician.

But despite his physical ailments, the middle schooler loved basketball. He had played on Katie’s Komets since he was 6, and was dedicated to his craft. Every morning, he would do 100 push-ups and shoot a basketball 130 times from his bed — a practice he still does today.

Dunphy admired Liples’ spirit and signed off on it immediately.

“It was easy to say yes to,” he said.

Dunphy had some familiarity with the wheelchair basketball community. In the 1990s, the coach would attend wheelchair basketball tournaments at the Carousel House in west Fairmount Park. He’s always been inspired by the athletes, but none more than Liples.

To Dunphy, it’s not just what Liples does on the court, although that is impressive in its own right. It’s how self-sufficient he is off it, the everyday tasks Liples handles with ease.

The coach pointed to a recent bus trip as an example.

“His upper body is so strong,” Dunphy said. “He just jumps over the seats, catches on to a couple of railings, and they either bring the wheelchair down to him or they bring it on the bus. And he gets himself in the seat.

“That’s the thing: He’s not looking for any help. He’s just a self-sufficient guy.”

The amount of access that a Team IMPACT child gets depends on the college and what it is willing to give. But Dunphy quickly decided he would give a lot. Liples has few — if any — limits on where he can go.

In addition to sitting on the bench for every home game, Liples is in the locker room during speeches, on the bus during citywide road trips, and at practices whenever he can make them.

Players have gone to bowling alleys and pizza parties with Liples. A few have stayed late after games and practices to help the teenager with his shooting form.

In the fall, Marrero, forward Demetrius Lilley, and guard Eric Acker made the drive from northwest Philadelphia to Doylestown to play wheelchair basketball in Liples’ driveway. Kira Liples, Ciarlo’s mother, expected them to stay for maybe an hour, at most.

Instead, they stayed for three. The players arrived at practice the next day with sore arms.

“I was talking so much crap before that because I thought I was going to be good at it,” Marrero said. “But you really have to be skilled. Because it’s really hard. We got smoked by Ciarlo.”

Added Liples, with a grin: “I cooked them. It took them, like, 15-20 minutes to make their first shot. So I talked to them a bit [about that]. But it was really fun. It was fun to be able to teach them something.”

McKeithan couldn’t attend, but he made it up to Liples a few months later. In December, he challenged the teenager to a shooting contest after a game. They stayed in the gym for hours, as Liples tried to hit 10 shots in a row.

“He just kept hitting it,” McKeithan said. “And he was shooting it from deep. He wasn’t taking layups. He was competing with us the same way anyone else would.”

The teenager is so omnipresent that people now notice when he’s not around. A few weeks ago, he couldn’t attend a home game because of poor weather. Multiple players approached Doyle with one question: “Where’s Ciarlo?”

“He’s like our 17th man,” Doyle said.

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Liples is especially close with Dunphy, saying he has learned a lot from being around the winningest coach in Big 5 history — and not just from a technical standpoint. Most of what he has taken are the intangibles: how to play a selfless game.

“He’s a legend,” Liples said. “He’s taught me to win gracefully. If you’re winning and you’re up by 40, don’t shoot threes. That kind of thing. When we’re in the locker room, he always closes out the discussion with ‘Be focused and be poised.’

“So don’t be cocky. Be the better person. If someone intentionally fouls you, try not to fight back. I listen to what he says and use it when I play.”

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Liples has loved basketball for as long as he can remember. His older brother, Dominic, played other sports — soccer, baseball — but rolling onto a court was far easier than rolling onto a field.

So Ciarlo would go to Dominic’s basketball games the most. He was so impacted by this experience that when he was fitted for his first wheelchair, at age 3, he excitedly told his mother, “Now I can play wheelchair basketball.”

“I didn’t even know that he knew it existed,” Kira said. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, sure! You can definitely do that.’”

Dominic was diagnosed with a diffuse midline glioma, a malignant brain tumor, in March 2016, when Ciarlo was 5½. He died that December.

It was a devastating loss. But the Explorers have given Ciarlo a different kind of brotherhood, and they’ve done it at a time when he has needed it.

The past few years have been challenging. Because Ciarlo plays adaptive sports, he has struggled to connect with local kids outside of the classroom at Lenape Middle School partially because he can’t play alongside able-bodied students.

“It’s hard,” Kira said. “He doesn’t play local sports, but he’s an athlete. And most plans happen at practices, at games, when the parents are there. It’s more out of sight, out of mind. I don’t think it’s that people don’t like him. He’s just not there. He has [that sense of community] with his wheelchair basketball team, but all of his teammates live far away.”

At La Salle, he has found a new sense of belonging. Liples’ favorite moments with the Explorers haven’t been at games, but rather when they’re off campus — bowling, playing video games, shooting hoops in the driveway. Doing things any 14-year-old would do.

It has brought more joy to their lives.

“Our house is really quiet,” Kira said. “We don’t have Dominic here anymore for them to argue or hang out. So it’s kind of giving him a little bit of that big brother aspect. If Dominic was alive, he’d be going to his games, you know? So it helps to have that kind of substitute.

“We’ve all developed relationships. It’s not just Ciarlo. A couple of the players call me ‘Mom.’ And I don’t do much. I’m just sitting in the stands. But most of them come over and give me a hug when they see me. They’re really sweet and loving. It’s just a nice group of guys.”

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Liples is supposed to be paired with La Salle through next season, but Dunphy’s retirement could complicate that. No one knows how the program’s incoming coach will react to the Team IMPACT partnership or whether he’ll allow Liples the same amount of access.

But for now, the Liples family is trying to stay optimistic. So are La Salle’s players and coaches. They don’t feel like this has been a one-way relationship.

If anything, they feel the opposite.

“As much as he’s benefited from it, there’s no question who has benefited more,” Dunphy said. “And that’s our guys, and me.”