Miguel Bocachica knew that he had a special player on his hands.
"Any time you watch him, he has it," Bocachica told Mid-Major Madness. "He's competitive, there's no off-day. He's the same player every day, and when you get to see him every day at practice, you just know it."
So, it frustrated the West Catholic High School (Philadelphia) coach when his young point guard kept reaching in and putting himself into foul trouble. Then, Bocachica came up with a solution.
"I'll make you a deal," Bocachica recalls telling him. "If you can walk into the second half and you have no fouls or one foul, I'll look at you and I'll say 'Hey, go take the ball.'"
From there, the legend of Budd Clark began to grow.
"It's insane the percentage that he would do that when I would say 'take the ball'," the coach said.
"I'm a pretty good defender," Clark said. "So I'll just go take the ball from the other team's best player, I'll guard the other team's best player and I'll stop him."
He remembers a game against Father Judge where the deal completely changed the game.
"In the second half, he just let me loose," Clark said. "I just had steals back-to-back-to-back."
During his three years at West Catholic under Bocachica's tutelage, Clark evolved from an exciting small guard into one of the best players in Philadelphia's robust basketball scene. Now a sophomore at Merrimack, the 5-foot-10 Clark is second in the MAAC in scoring and steals, and atop the charts in assists. His success is no surprise to anybody who has ever been in a gym with him, nor is the Warriors' reliance on him.
Despite his then 5-foot-7 frame, Clark averaged double digits as a freshman in the Philadelphia Public League for Boys Latin before making the move to WC. Wired to score, he's long made the game look easy even before Bocachica first watched him play on the AAU circuit.
"If you talk to people who have seen him for years," Bocachica said. "They'll always say 'oh yea, little Budd has been doing that since he was six', so he's a lifer."
He had to come off the bench during his first season at West Catholic because of his foul trouble. While it limited the impact that he could imprint on a given game, it was crucial to his growth as a player and student of the game. Clark says that it helped him understand the value that he provided to his team, and it showed as his minutes grew.
Bocachica had begun to turn around the culture at West Catholic, which hadn't had a winning season in the PCL since 2009 until Clark's first season (Bocachica's third), in 2021, where the Burrs went 6-4 in the league.
As Clark continued to grow as a point guard, seeing the game at a higher level and understanding the structure of the PCL, he moved into the starting lineup for his junior season.
Even though he played alongside future Division I players like Kareem and Kaseem Watson and Zion Stanford, West Catholic was Clark's team now. He had the ball in his hands, dictating the flow of the game, and it paid off.
In 2021-22, he led the PCL in steals per game with 3.5, finished third in the league in assists per game with 6.0, and was the team's second-leading scorer, leading West Catholic to a 12-1 record in the PCL, tying for first. When the Burrs needed a bucket, they let Clark figure out how they'd get it.
The next season, it became even more clear, with Clark finishing third in the PCL in scoring as a senior, with 18.8 points per game, while still finishing second in assists and at the top in steals.
"Our coaching staff, his teammates, we all agreed that we win games because we have Budd Clark and y'all don't," Bocachica said.
While it may sound straightforward, it rang true throughout every Philadelphia gym.
"He just had a relentless motor and drive about him, combined with his talent," Josh Verlin, the editor-in-chief of City of Basketball Love, told Mid-Major Madness. "He made the right plays with the ball in his hands, played tough defense, just set the tone for the whole team."
Every day that Clark entered his high school gym, he stared at a blank blue banner. It bothered him and everybody that saw it.
It was the dark cloud that hung over the program for decades.
"(The coaches) kept pointing to a poster," Clark said. "There was nothing on it, there were no state championships. That motivated me and my teammates to put that up there."
And it would happen because the Burrs had Budd Clark, and nobody else in the state did.
In the state quarterfinal against Executive Charter during Clark's senior year, West Catholic struggled throughout the game, until it was Budd Clark time.
"He had one of those moments," Bocachica said. "It was like, steal, layup, get to a pull-up, drive it, dump it off to Zion Staford for a dunk. He just gets in those modes. He just hates losing, and he always has a chip on his shoulder."
Every single game, Bocachica would remind Clark that West Catholic won because it had Budd Clark, and the other team didn't. He continued to fulfill the prophecy, close out game after game en route to a state championship, where he scored a game-high 32 points in the final.
Despite all of the success he had in high school, it took a very long time for any recruiting buzz to generate.
"I feel like I was very overlooked," Clark said. "People looked at me because I was small, they didn't want me, this and that."
Even when Joe Gallo first saw him at a Philly Live event in June of 2022, he wasn't recruiting him, as Merrimack had already filled its point guard of the future role with then-incoming freshman Javon Bennett. But that didn't stop him and assistant coach Micky Burtnyk from falling in love with Clark's game, and storing his name on a list of players to know just in case.
He committed to Coppin State midway through his senior year, one of just three offers he had at the time, but his recruitment reopened when head coach Juan Dixon was let go in March. A week later, Bennett entered the transfer portal, and all of the sudden, on the eve of Clark's state championship game, Gallo needed a point guard.
"We drove five or six hours down to Hershey," Gallo told Mid-Major Madness. "And we offered him right after the game."
Clark had a few more offers to choose from his second time around, but picked the Warriors over four other northeast mid-major programs.
The choice immediately paid off, keeping Merrimack's trajectory as a program on the rise from day one. In his third college game, after Warriors' star Jordan Derkack - who ended up winning NEC Player of the Year - went down hurt in the first half, Clark took over, leading the team to a road win over a stingy Maine group.
"I knew I had to be more of a leader," he said. "I picked them team up and just did what I do best - get baskets and get my teammates open."
He scored 17 of his 19 points in the second half of that game, the first of many that Merrimack would win because it had Budd Clark, and the other team did not.
Bocachica wasn't surprised.
"He's an any time, any place, type of basketball player," he said. "The environment doesn't bother him. It's just Budd on a basketball court playing basketball in his mind."
Clark closed out games against LIU and Stonehill later in his freshman year, and scored 24 in the Warriors' NEC Semifinal win over Le Moyne.
Additionally, he was a seamless fit for Merrimack's zone, even though he'd hardly played at the top of a zone before stepping on campus. His aggressiveness and instincts allow him to force a ton of turnovers, while the zone can sometimes protect him from the foul trouble that plagued him in high school.
Once Derkack left for Rutgers in the offseason, it truly became Clark's team as Merrimack made the jump to the MAAC. This season, his averages have increased from 13.4 points and 3.9 assists to 19.6 points and 5.7 assists, and Merrimack is 6-1 in the MAAC. He's the first player since Antoine Davis in 2022-23 to have a usage rate above 35% in over 90% of his team's minutes, and one of just eight players since 2007-08 to hit both of those marks.
While Gallo initially pushed back on the idea that the Warriors win games because they have Clark, and opponents don't, touting the supporting cast which has also lifted the level of play throughout the year, he knows where it all starts.
"Budd is the catalyst, Budd stirs the drink," he said. "He makes everybody else better."
And when the clock is winding down, it's the same old story.
He's had game-winning stops on defense, like poking the ball out from Sacred Heart's Tanner Thomas with under a second to play, and game-winning plays on offense. None of this has been new to him.
"I can close a game in any way," Clark said. "My coaches believe in me and trust me just doing what I do on the court. Get an assist, make a pull-up jump shot, or getting a stop on the other team's best player.
When Merrimack gets a late lead, the Warriors are all too content to let Clark dribble the air out of the shot clock, draining the timer, and creating an isolation opportunity. In Merrimack's last two wins, games against Manhattan and Siena, Clark delivered the knockout blows after long possessions of standing and waiting for the opportunity.
"I would say in the last four minutes of a game, (we win because) we have Budd Clark and you don't," Gallo said. "It's like having Mariano Rivera. He's the ultimate closer to have on your side."