THE GAZETTE
Thursday, January 30, 2014 lr
New to the game,
THRIVING
Continued from Page A-10 Conference. The third-year varsity player is helping lead Seton’s offense and defense, averaging five rebounds, four assists and four steals per game. She’s a different — much improved — player from what she was with the Hurricanes, said Seton senior Casey Davis, who played AAU basketball with Musgrave. But she’s still the same, fun teammate, Davis said. “She’s just always been the same,” Davis said. “She’s always had a good personality, always really goofy.” Musgrave started high school at the Academy of the Holy Cross and transferred to Seton as a sophomore, reuniting with Scruggs and Davis after about four years apart. “I knew she was really good,” Davis said. “… I was excited for her to come to Seton and help us out.” Musgrave, who signed to play basketball with Central Connecticut State University, has developed into one of the WCAC’s top scorers. Using a well-rounded offensive game, she has hit a team-best 25 3-pointers while converting 83 percent of her nearly seven free throws per game. “It was really funny because she was like a post player at that age,” Davis said. “… It’s pretty hard for people to guard her because she can either drive or shoot.” The two-way star scored a game-high 19 points in a Jan. 16 win 58-57 over Paul VI Catholic, a top WCAC team. “She has another gear to be able to push herself in a way that other people can’t,” Scruggs said. “... That competitiveness, that high level of competitiveness is what really [makes her] one of the best players.” Musgrave is happy to be back playing under Scruggs on Seton’s basketball team even though “he can be really hard on you,” she said. “He’s an amazing coach,” Musgrave said. “That’s why I wanted to come back to him so badly. He knows the game really well.” Musgrave believes Seton, which had a seven-game win streak snapped by the WCAC’s St. John’s College High, has what it takes to win a title. “I want to help my team the best I can to get to the championship,” Musgrave said. egoldwein@gazette.net
COACHES
Continued from Page A-10 ships with high school basketball players, but the county has seen its fair share of coaches who seem to perennially draw the best out of whatever talent, or lack thereof, they are dealt. The ability to communicate and get players to buy into one’s coaching system should be at the top of every coach’s list of priorities, Glick said. But what does it take to earn that respect in the first place? Coaches agreed finding a way to relate to their players plays a major role. “I kind of try to relate to the kids in a way where I try to teach them that sports and life are
CAMPUS
Continued from Page A-10 I’m not exaggerating — him and Dion have probably played 100 games together. He’s a neighborhood guy. This is where he’s from, this is his school, he’s just returning to his school. I don’t even see him as a transfer.” Johnson may not see Smith as a transfer, but the rest of the surrounding area certainly does. With the added presence of another Division I recruit — Smith maintains he is still leaning towards UNC Greensboro despite reneging on his verbal commitment — numerous websites, writers, athletes, and even a few area coaches took to social media to dub the Wolverines the Class 2A state champion favorites. With Wiley, a University of Maryland signee and the previous top-ranked recruit in the state, Broddie, another likely Division I-bound guard, Anthony Smith, a power forward garnering interest from upper-level schools, and now Quadree Smith, there are no visible weaknesses in this year’s Potomac team. “He’ll dominate the public schools,” said Keith Stevens, who coaches both Wiley and Quadree Smith for the well-known Amateur Athletic Union program, Team Takeover. “Especially with guards like Dion and Broddie around him because they can’t double him or he’ll just kick it to Dion, and they can’t double Dion because he’ll get it to ‘Q.’” As could have been expected, the movement of such a high-profile athlete so late in the season did not come without grumblings or rumors. Several sites listed a recruiting argument between Quadree’s father, Rob, and Farello as the sole reason for Quadree’s leaving. Farello encouraged Quadree to sign with UNC Greensboro during the early signing period, according to Rob, but the Smiths preferred to wait and see if Spartan coach Wes Miller would be offered a contract extension. The Smiths wanted to ensure Qua-
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Top player started playing three years ago BY
TRAVIS MEWHIRTER STAFF WRITER
It’s astonishing that the two best players on the Charles H. Flowers High School basketball team have less than seven years of experience between them, about half the amount of nearly every other lightlyto-heavily recruited senior in the Prince George’s County 4A League. Yet, Clint Robinson and Patrick Johnson — the lesser known of the pair — are taking the Jaguars out to an 11-4 record in a hyper-competitive league boasting Division I recruits who have played since they were old enough to hold a ball. Johnson, a football player his whole life, was drawn in by a kid who lived down the street named James Robinson, then a star at DeMatha Catholic. An eighth grader at the time, Johnson marveled at the way Robinson, an undersized guard now starting for the University of Pittsburgh, could carve up his challengers at the local park, dominating neighborhood pickup games. “He was the one that really pushed me into it,” Johnson said of Robinson. It wouldn’t be long before curiosity completely got the better of him, and if it were Robinson who gave Johnson the initial nudge towards basketball, it was a 6-foot-9 wiry shooting guard named Kevin Durant who indirectly tipped him
challenges and we use a lot of examples of real-life situations and apply them to [basketball],” said sixth-year Frederick Douglass boys’ coach Tyrone Massenburg, who has been coaching in the county since 1987. “The kids have to understand the meaning of why they should try to achieve certain goals. I’ve been fortunate enough to be in three areas of the county, I’ve seen all types of kids in this area and I know what buttons to push to be consistent.” Part of relating to players, Glick added, is keeping up with the times — five years ago he said he would never have texted his athletes but does it quite often these days. Adolescents are pulled in all different directions these days and don’t receive criti-
over the edge. When Johnson was a sophomore, again teetering on the edge of trying out for the junior varsity basketball team after opting out his freshman year, he flipped on the TV and saw Durant scoring truckloads ononeunfortunateteamoranother, andrecalledthinking,“’Icouldprobably do some of this stuff.’” In just his third year playing on an organized basketball team, with rules and referees and coaches and the like, Johnson is doing a lot of that “stuff”hespokeof,thoughquiteabit more rugged than the National Basketball Association’s scoring leader. “What helps Patrick is he’s a tremendous athlete,” Flowers coach Mark Edwards said. “He’s a power guard, a power forward who just finds a way to get to the rim.” He has been a complement to Robinson, who picked up the game as a freshman, teaming up with the 6-foot-7 big man for a bit more than
cism the same way they did 20 years ago, so it’s important for coaches to convey constructive criticism in a positive manner. “If coaches don’t criticize in a positive way, if they berate the kids, they’re just going to tune them out,” Glick said. It’s also imperative, coaches agreed, for them to show their players they truly care about their well-being. Whether it’s attending a game during another sports
dree was going someplace where he would be coached by the same man who recruited him. “It made sense to see what kind of system they were running, who was going to change jobs,” Rob Smith said. “Because a lot of the times they’ll sell you on it and then they’ll leave the school and your son is still signed to go there.” So Quadree reopened his recruitment, which caused a rift between the family and Farello. This, however, is “probably the fourth or fifth reason,” according to Rob, that Quadree ultimately decided to transfer to Potomac. Because Paul VI is about 2 to 2½ hours away from his Oxon Hill home, Quadree’s alarm was set at 4 a.m. weekday mornings. He would regularly return home around 11 p.m., crank out homework until past midnight, take a glorified nap, and then repeat the process. The mental and physical toll wore on him. At Potomac, he is able to wake up nearly three hours later and arrive home sometimes up to five hours earlier. His allotted time for studying has nearly tripled, the financial cost of a two-hour commute each way reduced to nearly nothing, and any politics removed entirely. Smith is just playing basketball again. “Everything’s been great,” he said a few days prior to scoring 21 points and grabbing 21 rebounds in a 113-41 win over Friendly. “I know basically the whole school. It felt like I was just going from one home to another.” The senior spoke kindly of his time at Paul VI, which came with a WCAC championship his sophomore year and a top 10 national ranking this season. But he appeared generally content, relaxed with longtime teammate, Wiley, and Broddie, whom he attended middle school with, in the backcourt. “Dion knows how I like to play and I know how he likes to play,” Smith said. “The IQ that I have with Dion on the court, it’s like a tag team out there.” tmewhirter@gazette.net
GREG DOHLER/THE GAZETTE
Eleanor Roosevelt High School’s Bryant Best (right) drives the ball against Charles H. Flowers’ Patrick Johnson during a game earlier this year.
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28 points per game, and already has a dunk contest title to his name. “I feel like I came a long way after starting my sophomore year,” he said. “I could barely touch the rim back then and now I’m winning dunk contests.” Dunk contests mean very little in the grand scheme of things, but what high school student doesn’t want to win a dunk contest? Edwards took the Jaguars to Salisbury over the winter holidays for the Governor’s Challenge, which so happened to include a dunk contest. The 6-2 Johnson was thrown in the mix despite standing a good five inches shorter than the majority of his soon-to-be-losing competitors. “There was literally one dude who was smaller than me,” he said. Regardless, his post-practice dunk sessions with Robinson proved invaluable, as Johnson rammed home a pair of windmills in Salisbury to earn the title of dunk
season or listening when a player is in need, the kids need to know their coach genuinely cares. Coaches also agreed there is a correlation between consistency within a coaching staff and a program’s success. Most of the county’s perennially successful teams have longer standing coaches. Within that, Glick said, is the development of a good junior varsity program to ensure that players are familiar with the
Gwynn Park system and ready for varsity ball. Glick said hiring 2002 Gwynn Park graduate Spencer Way six years ago to head up the Yellow Jackets’ junior varsity team was the best decision he’s made for his program. O’Connell said he is a players’ coach. Many of the county’s most effective leaders probably are. They remember what they enjoyed most as a player and speak
champion. “I always wanted to do it,” he said of his winning, windmill dunk, “and I knew I had enough bounce to get it.” That’s all fun and good, but any football player with “bounce” can put on an aesthetically pleasing aerial show without necessarily knowing the first rule of basketball. As Johnson said, however, he has “come a long way” since those tryouts his sophomore year. Basketball is “where my heart is now,” he said. “I think the only guy I’ve seen pick it up as fast as Patrick is Clint,” Edwards said. His ball-handling, though still a hair on the raw side, came around over the summer Amateur Athletic Union circuit and he would often spend anywhere from three to four hours in the gym alone, honing his game much like he once did with football. Those hours have paid off, both for him and Flowers. Though he still plays more like a tight end than a shooting guard — he has yet to make a 3-pointer — preferring power to finesse, Johnson has been giving teams plenty of fits. “We didn’t play good defense and we didn’t rebound,” DuVal coach Lafayette Dublin said after a 62-53 defeat at the hands of Flowers. It’s tough to do both when a 6-2, 190-pound guard named Patrick Johnson scores 20 points and grabs 18 rebounds. That’s something not even James Robinson did. tmewhirter@gazette.net to their charges in those terms. “I think the fun part about coaching public school basketball is that we coach who’s there,” O’Connell said. “We don’t get to go get players like colleges or some of the private schools do. One year you can have a ton of big guys, the next year all guards. That’s kind of the fun part.” jbeekman@gazette.net