In Malvern Prep basketball history, there are an impressive 16 1000-point scorers. Scorers Barkley Sample, Gary Duda, and Ryan Williams have all performed well on the court as well as outside basketball.
One member of Malvern Prep’s 1000-point scoring club is hall-of-fame athlete, Barkley Sample ’81.
Sample grew up playing basketball from a very young age. Sample’s father played in the NFL for twelve years, so he was always surrounded by an athletic environment. Barkley’s sport in the winter was basketball, but he played football, baseball, tennis, and track throughout his early years.
“My dad was a four-sport athlete in college and played in the NFL for 12 years,” Sample said. “He took me to New York training camp with him. I basically grew up in a professional sports locker room and was surrounded by sports all my life. My godfather, Sonny Hill, ran basketball programs in Philadelphia going back to the 1960s. Between the two of them, I always had some sort of ball in my hand. I played everything, I played football, I played basketball, I played baseball, I played tennis, I ran track and I did a little bit of everything. Basketball was just what you did in the wintertime.”
Sample hit 1000 points in a unique way: the Inter-Ac championship game his senior year.
[Being a 1000-point scorer] … means a lot,” Sample said. “Especially in terms of when it happened. I reached the point in the final game of my career. We played Episcopal for the Inter-Ac championship that night. We beat them up pretty good and ended up winning the title. I scored my 1000 points during that game. So the fact that I’m able to accomplish that and winning the championship, made it even more gratifying.”
Sample continued his athletic career by playing Football at Brown University. He would have loved to play basketball alongside football, but he had to balance both athletics and rigorous academics, so he continued to play football.
I played football at Brown, so that [Inter-Ac Championship] was the last game I played,” Sample said. “Basketball-wise, I actually had a thought of trying to play both. But there was just too much overlap. The basketball team, their first game of the season was the same night as our first football game of the season, and being as academically rigorous as Brown is, it was very difficult and very challenging to be a two-sport athlete like that.
Sample loves coming back to campus and is still very involved by being a member of the Alumni Board Association and The Board of Trustees.
“I love coming back,” Sample said. “I’ve been involved with Malvern since I graduated but really more intensely since my induction into the Wall of Fame in 2000. At that point, I became a class agent for my class and I’ve done two different spins on the Alumni Association Board and I’m currently a member of the Board of Trustees. I was humbled to be asked to be inducted to the Wall of Distinction a year and a half ago. Malvern and my elementary school Waldron Academy were probably the second and third most influential pieces of my childhood and becoming an adult.”
One of Malvern’s current faculty members, Gary Duda ‘88, is also part of the 1000-point scoring club.
Duda’s favorite sports were basketball and baseball; Malvern allowed Duda to do both, which was something he greatly desired.
“Baseball and basketball were two of my favorite sports,” Duda said. “I heard about Malvern and they were going to allow me to play both sports, and I knew I wanted to play both.”
Achieving such a significant amount of career points required a program that allowed Duda to get involved as a freshman and allowed Duda to “shoot with some freedom.”
“Malvern gave me an opportunity,” Duda said. “They gave me an opportunity to play when I was a freshman. They allowed me to shoot with some freedom, that’s why I loved this place. The three-point shot didn’t come in until after my freshman and sophomore year here. There wasn’t a three-point shot, no three-point line. I think I probably would have scored well over 2000 points if I had the three-point line.
“It’s cool to see your name up on the banner, but it just means I took a heck of a lot of shots,” Duda remarked.
After Malvern, Duda continued to play basketball at Merrimack College, where he continued to excel. One of Duda’s goals was to get a full scholarship in order to attend college for free, and Merrimack allowed him to do just that.
“I played at Merrimack College,” Duda said. “Back then, Merrimack College was a division two school, and now it’s a division one school. Merrimack was the first school where I got offered a full scholarship when I was a junior. My only goal was to get some kind of a scholarship, so my parents did not have to pay for me in college, whether it was baseball, whether it was basketball, I was lucky enough to be offered my junior year and I accepted my junior year.”
Duda moved back to the Philadelphia area after college for an accounting job.
“I took a job instead of staying up in Boston, I came back to Philadelphia, and took a job with Coopers and Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) and I was in accounting. I was in the audit field for three years right after college.”
Duda has been teaching at Malvern for the last twenty-nine years.
“I’ve been here twenty-nine years, the first two or three years are kind of surreal because you’re working alongside teachers that taught you,” Duda said. “That certainly was a different experience. To see Malvern today from where it was forty years ago, It’s really cool. I mean, if you had told me that I would be the head varsity golf coach if you would have told me that we would have a golf simulator on campus, I would have told you, you’re out of your mind. But here we are.”
When asked, “Do you think it’s easier or harder to score 1000 points today or when you played? Duda responded by talking about how the pace of the game allows for more scoring today, but scoring 1000 points is still not an easy task.
“Put it this way, I think I think you get more opportunities today,” Duda said. “The pace is so much faster than it was that it was back then. I’m an old-school guy and I’ll always revert back to my old school mentality. We were all able to score, that’s hard to do. No matter how many shots you take you’re still got to make a good percentage of them. The game is a lot different today, I think it’s more fun today.”
This year Malvern welcomed its most recent member of the 1000-point scoring club, Ryan Williams ‘24.
Ryan is grateful to have reached this milestone and had great advice for anyone who would like to get to this point in their Malvern career.
“Put your head down and keep working,” Williams advised. “There’s not too many people here that play as freshmen and even though there were two this year, I didn’t play as a freshman and I know a lot of great basketball players that didn’t play until sophomore and junior year. You shouldn’t get discouraged from where you start, just focus on where you want to finish.”
The future will definitely hold more 1000-point scorers here at Malvern Prep. Hard work and determination seem to allow these athletes to achieve such a high amount of career points, and these same values continue to allow them to thrive outside of sports.
