James "Booney" Salters still has the electric energy he had when he played on the Penn basketball team, the energy that recently earned him a spot in the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame.
He said he is still riding high and basking in the "emotional" honor he received on January 19 at the Palestra, where he was inducted along with Donnie Carr of La Salle, Rap Curry of Saint Joseph's, and Claudrena Harold of Temple.
Salters was a dynamic point guard for the Quakers from 1976-1980 with self-proclaimed "solid but not great" numbers - averages of 9.5 points, 3 assists and 1.4 rebounds per game.
So what won him a spot in the Hall? That energy, that spunk, that extra something that statistics don't reveal.
"For me, it was very special because [the induction] wasn't just about the numbers," Salters said. "It came from people who know the game, know what I brought to the game and to that team."
What he brought earned him Penn's Most Valuable and Most Inspirational Player award on a team that was expected to make very little, if any, splash in the basketball world.
Instead, those 1979-1980 Quakers shocked everyone and went on to beat Princeton in the Ivy League playoff game and make it to the second round of the NCAA tournament. None of it would have happened without Salters's game winning-basket against Princeton, his proudest moment of his Penn career.
"As a senior, I knew immediately that I was going to be the leader of the team, and that everyone was looking to me to make the right decisions and tell them what to do and what not to do," said Salters, the lone senior on that inexperienced squad. "I was always the coach on the floor."
When the Quakers started out the season 0-4, he was asked to step up even further. He was brought into the coach's office and told he needed to be more aggressive offensively, to take more shots for himself and worry less about setting others up for their shots. If the team was going to win, it was going to carry it.
He did just that. After that meeting, the season turned around and Penn went on a run that had the Philadelphia papers calling them the "Hottest Team in Philly," Salters recalled.
His junior year wasn't too shabby, either, with Salters showing a flair for the dramatic.
"Booney" led his team of 1978-1979 to the Final Four with game-winning points against No. 3 North Carolina and St. John's.
In that historic season, the Quakers finished 25-7 overall and 13-1 in the Ivy League, and Salters was selected Second Team All-Ivy.
During his three seasons suiting up for the Red and Blue, the Quakers were a dominant 62-27 and captured one Big 5 title.
Salters brought the same devotion to the game he showcased as a star player at Penn to coaching at his old high school. And though he ultimately decided to leave the sport for business ventures, he's still maintained his willingness to try and help improve the lives of others.
"I found myself being too involved personally in the lives of the children and I had to make a decision: was I going to help people through coaching or was I going to help them doing my second love, which is my real estate," he said.
"What I decided to do was just stick with the real estate and put a lot of people in homes who otherwise would not have homes."
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