A senior who never transferred? Among Big 5 men’s basketball teams, Penn’s Cam Thrower is one of one.

It’s senior day Saturday at the Palestra, and four members of the Penn men’s basketball team will be honored: Ethan Roberts, Cam Thrower, Johnnie Walter, and Dylan Williams.

“It’s definitely bittersweet,” Thrower said Wednesday after a morning practice at the Palestra.

More for him than the rest of them.

Among the four players, Thrower, a native of Southern California, is the only one who attended Penn as a freshman and never transferred. It makes him a Lone Ranger of sorts on a basketball team that has undergone change with name, image, and likeness legislation, the modern transfer portal, and, this season, a new coach, Fran McCaffery, who took over after Steve Donahue was fired at the end of last season.

Thrower, though, isn’t just the only four-year senior at Penn. Among the six Big 5 men’s basketball programs, Thrower, a 6-foot-3 guard, is sort of a unicorn. He is the only senior who plays, the only non-walk-on, who is at the same school where he first attended classes as a freshman.

It is a sign of the times in a sport that, at least locally, has lost some of its luster. People are less invested when they don’t know any of the players at their favorite schools. One class below Thrower, there are just four juniors in the Big 5 who are in their third year at the same place, and two of them are at Penn.

The sport has rapidly changed, and you don’t need to go back far to see the effects. In the 2019-20 season, before the pandemic upended the four-year track and before NIL and the transfer portal took over the sport, the numbers were drastically different. That year, there were 12 four-year seniors in the Big 5 and 14 three-year juniors.

This isn’t just limited to men’s hoops. On the women’s side of the Big 5, only seven Throwers exist. Two at Drexel, two at St. Joseph’s, and three at Penn.

“It’s definitely a rare thing nowadays,” said Thrower, whom Donahue recruited out of the venerable Harvard-Westlake School. “But for my family and I, the biggest thing coming into college was finding a situation where, regardless of what happens with basketball, I could meet great people, and having a great, well-rounded experience was something that we valued and Penn has provided that and changed my life for the better.”

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Thrower said he wears the distinction that was recently brought to his attention as a ”badge of honor." But the Wharton student knows that everyone’s journey is different, and he doesn’t judge those around him and in college basketball for moving around and finding the best situation for themselves.

“Penn has been great to me,” Thrower said. “Basketball has been great to me.”

The backup guard is averaging 5.2 points in 16.5 minutes in 21 games this season after missing all of last year with a wrist injury. His basketball journey has had ups and downs. One of the highs came in his sophomore year. He started and scored 11 points in 26 minutes when the Quakers knocked off a nationally ranked Villanova team at the Palestra.

The injury wiped out his junior season, then Donahue was fired. Transferring wasn’t really an option, Thrower said. A Penn degree is more valuable than wherever he might transfer to continue playing basketball. So Thrower stayed, and he helped McCaffery and a new team transition into a new season.

“His attitude and his leadership and his work ethic, for a new coach it’s incredibly appreciated,” McCaffery said. “You need your veteran guys to show the example for the younger guys, and that’s what he does.”

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McCaffery, who last coached at Iowa, is a Philadelphia native who was a rarity in 1978 when he transferred from Wake Forest to Penn. Back then, moving around from school to school wasn’t as prevalent as it became.

“It’s just a different time,” McCaffery said. “Thank God for Cam that he went to Penn for all the right reasons and he stayed.”

Thrower said the end of the season is bringing a “sense of urgency,” one the team talked about after practice Wednesday. The Quakers have two home games this weekend — Friday vs. Dartmouth, and Saturday vs. Harvard — and finish the season next weekend with a road game at Brown. Penn (13-11, 6-5 Ivy) is on track to make the four-team Ivy Madness tournament and would be two wins from reaching the NCAA Tournament, a possibility, however small, that excites Thrower.

Off the court, he is spending his final few months on a campus and with a community that will stay with him forever. On the court, Thrower hasn’t scored in the last five games, and he’s averaging just 6.8 minutes during that stretch, but he’s savoring his final games and practices with a group of teammates that he’s constantly learning from.

“It’s helped me learn what life is and sometimes you may be with certain people for a year or two and then they move on with their lives,” Thrower said. “It’s a trial run of understanding what life can look like.”

What’s next?

Thrower is weighing the possibilities. He has studied finance, sports business, and legal studies and has learned a lot about professionalism and amateurism at an interesting time for those topics . But school isn’t done. Thrower said he wants to pursue his MBA and get his formal finance and accounting training under his belt before entering the workforce.

Surely, he could do those things at Penn. That wrist injury from last year, however, left him with another year of basketball eligibility, and Ivy League rules prohibit graduate students from playing varsity sports.

What if they didn’t?

“Penn has been great,” Thrower said, “but I want to see what else is out there.”