The Redondo boys basketball team had a tumultuous season of high hopes that were never fully realized, a star’s shocking departure that was never fully explained, and finally a thrilling playoff run that ended with a thud in a dud of a game Tuesday night.
The Sea Hawks’ season ended one game short of playing for the CIF State Southern California Regional Division 1 championship with a blowout 85-64 loss to Corona Centennial in the semifinals at Centennial.
The sudden, shocking end came just two days after Redondo’s best win of the season, an 80-77 victory Saturday night over St. John Bosco that saw all eight rotation players fulfilling their roles to perfection in a game that went down to the final few seconds.
Tuesday night’s disaster, however, was foreshadowed in the first few seconds, as Redondo turned the ball over on its first two possessions and watched as a tall and talented Centennial squad took full advantage and jumped out to an early lead.
“We dug ourselves a big hole and just never could climb out of it,” said senior guard Ryan Reeves, who played his last game for a Sea Hawk squad that ended the season with a record of 25-8 and a third consecutive Bay League championship.
By the end of the first quarter the Huskies were up 20-14, and it only got worse from there. The Huskies more than doubled Redondo’s scoring in the second quarter, 25-12, to push its half-time lead to 45-26. The lead grew to 67-41 at the end of three quarters, and the meaningless last quarter was the only one the Sea Hawks won, by a count of 23-19.
“We finally found our groove, but by then it was too late,” Reeves said.
Junior guard Leland Green led Redondo with 17 points, while sophomore guard Ryse Williams and junior forward/center Cameron Williams each chipped in with 11 points.
Guard Sedrick Barefield led the Huskies with 25 points, followed by forwards Ike Anigbogu and Jalen Hill, both 6-foot-9, who had 15 points each. Anigbogu had five dunks and was just too much for the shorter Sea Hawks to handle. Of course Redondo might have been able to neutralize all that height if its own 6-foot-9 sophomore sensation Billy Preston had not suddenly left the team in early January and started playing for Prime Prep in Dallas, Texas just a few days later.
Coach Reggie Morris stuck to his policy of not discussing anything about Preston’s departure for the last two months, so Sea Hawk fans were never offered an explanation of any kind other than the cryptic comments made by Preston’s mother, Nicole Player, to the Easy Reader. She insisted it was her decision to leave Redondo, not her son’s, and that it had nothing to do with problems on the team and everything to do with his academic situation at Redondo, the third of four schools Preston, a 17-year-old sophomore, ended up attending over a two-year span.
Still, Preston’s last game with the Sea Hawks, a blowout at the hands of nearby rival Torrance Bishop Montgomery, was Redondo’s low point of the season. Preston looked disinterested, his teammates looked resentful of his dominating the ball so much, and Coach Morris looked helpless and unable to do anything about the dysfunction on and off the court.
Reeves admitted Preston’s sudden exit was the psychological turning point of the season, for several reasons.
“We talked about it a lot in the beginning, and we finally came to the conclusion that he wasn’t coming back and that we couldn’t dwell on it anymore,” he said.
The Sea Hawks reeled off a 6-game winning streak after Preston left and gradually regained their self-confidence.
“We realized that we were just as good without him,” Reeves said. “We played together more, played more as a team.”
That was backed up by the obvious change in their style of play. Instead of playing an inside-out game of forcing the ball inside to Preston and waiting to see if he could create something for himself before kicking it back out to a teammate – a strategy Preston often nullified by hanging around the perimeter and hoisting up outside shots, as he did during his desultory performance in the loss to Bishop Montgomery – Redondo began to employ a dribble-drive offense where all five players handled the ball, drove to the basket, and if they couldn’t make a play for themselves or find an outside shooter simply passed the rock to a cutting teammate and started the process all over again.
Still, Preston’s departure left them woefully undersized, a deficit that they were usually able to neutralize with a relentless, 32-minutes-of-hell full court press and a 10-deep rotation that ensured they always had fresh legs on the court.
6-foot-2 guard Leland Green emerged as the Sea Hawks best and most talented player, the closest thing they had to a go-to guy in crunch time. But all eight of the primary rotation players were able to establish a role and an identity: 6-foot-4 Cameron Williams and 6-foot-5 Isaiah Jackson picked up the slack under the boards and blocked shots, 6-foot-3 guard Ryse Williams was the offensive catalyst when Green wasn’t making things happen, 6-foot-1 guard Morgan Means emerged as their most lethal outside shooter, a three-point threat from anywhere on the court, 6-foot-1 guard Cameron High was an elite athlete able to fill in at point guard, shooting guard or small forward, and Reeves was their glue guy, a rock-steady defender, ball-mover and shot-maker when defenses focused too much on Green, Ryse Williams and Means.
That left plenty of room for the Sea Hawks’ unique player, 5-foot-2 point guard Elijah Nesbit, to do his thing: break any press thrown at them, hound the opposing guards into turnovers and weave his way into the lane to create shots for himself or his teammates.
Of the Great Eight, only High, Reeves and Jackson are graduating. That leaves Green, Nesbit, Ryse and Cameron Williams and Means all coming back next year to try and complete the quest for a second state championship to go along with the one the Sea Hawks won two years ago.
“I think the sky’s the limit for them next year,” Reeves said.
By then the Billy Preston hangover will be cured and, with Morris’s proven ability to bring in elite players there could be another star or two to help Redondo complete its championship quest that fell so painfully short this season.
