M. Hoops | Rhymes and rims for Reilly

Justin Reilly?

He's that scruffy mass of energy at the end of the bench, the one who comes in, swarms the ball for a few possessions in the paint, maybe picks up a couple fouls against the other team's bigs.

He's an agitator - the guy at the gym who doesn't get picked until late but is sure to annoy the hell out of the poor guy he ends up guarding.

Or maybe he's something altogether different, something that cannot be gleaned from his intermittent spurts of Palestra run.

"I consider him," teammate Tyler Bernardini proffered, "the Robert Frost of Penn men's basketball."

Indeed, like departed ballers Ibrahim Jaaber and Stephen Danley before him, Reilly is a member of the Excelano Project, the University's only spoken-word poetry group.

"I think the good thing about it is that it's different from basketball," the junior forward said. "This season, I started with a lot of injuries. So this is my outlet - an outlet to try and bring awareness to another group of people."

In selecting which topics to tackle, Reilly says he seeks to explore - and often intermingle - both the deeply personal and the brazenly political, touching on issues ranging from relationships and love to race and religion.

Bernardini's take is less analytical.

"Girls, basketball, life - mostly girls," he said in appraising Reilly's poetic content. "Just the issues in his life. He just has to let it pour out on paper."

For her part, Excelano Project director Sruthi Sadhujan feels that Reilly's poetry has evolved considerably during his time at Penn.

Drawing on rap and hip-hop influences, she says, Reilly often operates in "shorter, packed sentences" with distinct rhythms and palpable rhyme schemes.

"He has an incredibly conscientious but very understated and mellow style," Sadhujan said. "He's very confident and extremely responsive to the crowd."

At the most recent Excelano performance last fall, that crowd included, by Reilly's estimation, "almost everybody on the team."

And for those who could not make it out to the show itself, Reilly was sure to offer an abridged version at a more convenient location.

As Bernardini recalls, Reilly had left the Palestra hardwood early during practice one day, thinking he was alone as he hit the locker room.

He wasn't - at least not for long.

"He practices loud," Bernardini said. "Gets really into it."

Before Reilly knew it, he was surrounded. The makeshift audience, though, was powerless in breaking his poetic gait.

"That usually doesn't faze me," Reilly said. "That's something that's the same in basketball. You have to stay focused, can't let the crowd influence what you're doing."

To be sure, as Reilly prepares for Excelano's spring show, the team can expect more impromptu performances in the weeks to come.

Bernardini, meanwhile, is still struggling to find Reilly a suitable literary analogue.

"Emily Dickinson, I would also compare him to," said Bernardini, reconsidering the Frost comparison.

"Those are the only two poets I know."

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