Redondo Union basketball title makes community proud
Redondo Union High students watch their basketball team with great anticipation. Photo
At halftime, the Sea Hawk section of the stadium was tense. The Redondo Union boys’ basketball team was barely hanging onto its four-point lead, shooting just 26 percent and turning the ball over too often for the coaches’ liking.
A couple hundred fans had traveled north that morning to Sleep Train Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, to watch the team fight College Park for the CIF Division II state championship. If they pulled it off, the Sea Hawks would take home the first state title for boys’ basketball in the high school’s 102-year history.
Coach Reggie Morris Jr., pensive in the first half. Photo
“This is a really big deal,” cheer captain Courtney Bowen said from her stadium seat. “This is history right here.”
Chimed in her co-captain Alyssa Crenshaw: “The whole school is watching this at home if they couldn’t come… We’re all proud to come from Redondo right now.”
The cheer squad blended into an eager crowd of parents, students, faculty, alumni, and supporters, whose painted faces, signs, and shouts of encouragement would propel the team past a shaky start.
Longtime Redondo security guard Joe Chavez had faith from the beginning.
“Oh yeah, they’ll win. They’re good. Haven’t you seen ‘em play? The community is fired up about this,” he said.
Coach Reggie Morris Jr. gives sophomore forward Jeremiah Headley some pointers. Photo
Junior Stephanie Alvarez had driven with a friend’s family to Sacramento to support the Sea Hawks.
“It’s their first time making it to the end so this is really special,” she said, taking her seat in the “cheering section,” a block of red-clad fans who had boarded two northbound “rooter buses” at 6 a.m. that morning.
Buoyed by the community support, the boys stepped up their game in the fourth quarter, scoring the first seven points to set the stage for a strong finish.
The momentum was building, and with it the anticipation. Senior guard Darrien Touchstone sank a three that catapulted Redondo into a 41-29 lead, but with just over two minutes remaining, junior point guard Ian Fox fouled out of the game. It was time for the team to rally.
Then, with 39.3 seconds to go and the lead trimmed to six points, 6’6” sophomore forward Jeremiah Headley snatched a pass from co-captain Derek Biale and slammed an astounding dunk. Stunned spectators watched him hanging from the rim, and they knew it was about to happen.
This team was about to make Redondo Beach history.
Jeremiah Headley slammed a massive dunk with 39.3 seconds to go in the fourth quarter, just before the Sea Hawks claimed their state title Saturday. His dunk made ESPN Sports Center’s Top Play. Photo
“The dunk was a dagger,” Biale said. “[It] fueled the game up for us. That was an unbelievable play.”
“I think the dunk just kinda was the icing on the cake,” head coach Reggie Morris Jr. said. “With Ian fouling out of the game, the team was coming back and trying to make a run. I think the dunk just put the nail in the coffin.”
Saturday night, the dunk made number one play of the day on ESPN’s Sports Center.
The junior varsity team recovers from Jeremiah Headley’s dunk. Photo
Headley, who with 19 points was the game’s top scorer, said a scrappy defender provoked him to go for it.
“We were going at each other the whole game and it really made me want to dunk on him,” he said.
Besides, Headley wanted that title. “The whole Redondo community was counting on us and we didn’t want to come home without the championship,” he said.
Before the stadium could recover from the shock of Headley’s dunk, the buzzer announced a 54-47 victory. The team man-piled in the middle of the court and the stadium broke into hugs, cheers, and tears.
And then, the fans started to chant.
“Thank-you-Reg-gie,” they said in loud unison. They wore red sequined bow ties – Coach Morris’ accessory of choice – and they cheered for the man who led Redondo’s basketball team from an unsuccessful 10-17 season last year to a 21-game winning streak and, ultimately, the state championship. “Thank-you-Reg-gie! We-love-Reg-gie!”
The Morris factor
Coach Reggie Morris Jr. gives team co-captain Derek Biale some direction. Photo
This was Morris’ first season at Redondo. In less than a year, he and nine other part-time coaches – Arturo Jones, Roy Walker, Jason Porter, Gary Anderson, Kevin Posey, Victor Martin Sr., Herald “JR” Martinez, Ken “Moon” Jones, and Malcohm Herron – turned the Seahawks’ game around. Six of those coaches have been with Morris for years.
The varsity team Morris started with boasted some standout talent, to be sure – by season’s end, Fox had averaged 15.4 points a game, Biale had 87 three-pointers, and Touchstone had 137 rebounds as a guard – but many believe the coach was the key that unlocked their potential and their victory.
RUHS principal Dr. Nicole Wesley feeling the pressure. Photo
“This is a tribute to Reggie,” John Fox, Ian’s dad, said of the win. “It was kind of a rough season last year and to have Reggie come in and do what he did is just amazing. He and the kids deserve this.”
Last year, impressed by Morris’ track record, athletic director Andy Saltsman recruited him from St. Bernard High School. Within three seasons, Morris had coached two separate teams, the Leuzinger Olympians and the St. Bernard Vikings, to Southern Section titles. Two of his former players, Russell Westbrook and Dorell Wright, were in the NBA. (Wright turned heads at Saturday’s game, for which he flew to Sacramento in support of his high school coach.)
Morris, 34, is cut from coaching cloth. His father, Reggie Morris Sr., coached Manual Arts High School and Los Angeles Southwest College to state titles when he was still a kid.
Freshman Leland Green plays defense. Photo
Exposure to basketball at a young age ignited in him a passion for the game that he “eats, breathes, and dreams,” his wife Jazzmien said, laughing.
Reggie Sr. believes his son is a great coach because he is first and foremost a “student of the game.”
“He has learned basketball technically, innately, and inherently throughout his lifetime. He’s caught on,” Reggie Sr. said. “At every school he’s been at he is teaching kids how to play good basketball, the fundamentals of how to think good basketball.”
Reggie Sr. doesn’t remember his son showing an interest in coaching until after he graduated from Howard University, where he played basketball. Reggie Jr. spent a year working with coaching staff at Mount St. Mary’s University as a graduate assistant, and from that point, he knew he wanted to live his father’s legacy.
Senior Darrien Touchstone and a College Park defender. Photo
Now, the two talk basketball daily. Reggie Sr. is a sounding board for plays and ideas, but claims no credit for Reggie Jr.’s mounting success as a coach.
“They’re his team, no doubt about it,” Reggie Sr. said of the newly-crowned Division II champions. “He runs it. He’ll run things by me, we’ll talk at home, but he is in control.”
Dad and the rest of Morris’ family were elated after Saturday’s game.
“I can’t put into words how excited and how proud I am of my brother,” Morris’ sister Ashley Brewster said, shaking her head after Saturday’s win. “This is like a dream come true. He’s been wanting this for years.”
Redondo Sea Hawk fans cheer their boys on. Photo
She and family were frantically calling friends to spread the news as they waited for Morris to emerge from the locker room.
Leslie Gittens, Morris’ mother, said hearing the stadium chant her son’s name at the buzzer brought tears to her eyes.
“You can’t describe it,” she said. “Every game is special but of course when you get to the championships it just gets more intense and more intense and more intense. We’re all so proud.”
“I’m in complete and utter disbelief,” Jazzmien said. “It’s amazing to see how much the boys have changed and how much better they’ve gotten and how much they believe in Reggie.”
Leland Green and Sebastian Lindner celebrate their win. Photo
Changing the system
Morris inherited a Redondo Union team with immense talent. But the Sea Hawks just weren’t winning games.
“I didn’t feel like [a championship] was possible,” said Biale, who played varsity all four years. “But then Coach Morris came in and he showed us his way and he changed the culture, and I started to believe we could accomplish anything.”
For Fox, the same realization struck when the Sea Hawks played the Bishop Montgomery Knights, the top-ranking Division IVAA powerhouse, in January.
“Coach Morris didn’t want us to be intimidated,” Fox said. “He wanted us to see they were just another team we had to play against.”
Redondo lost by just two points, 60-58 – after a controversial last play and a near-brawl between the teams after the clock expired – lending the Sea Hawks a critical boost of confidence. They’d stood up to the biggest bully on the block. They knew they had each other’s backs. And they knew they could beat anyone.
“That was definitely the turning point in the season because we went undefeated after that,” Fox said. “We had a 21-game winning streak after that.”
Coach Victor Martin Sr. gives Cameron High a pep talk. Photo
Coach Morris humbly attributes the team’s turnaround to the “system” he and his fellow coaches designed and to the players who were “willing to buy into it.”
“I was lucky enough to have a good bunch of kids who bought into the system that we have and were very open-minded and willing to try new things,” he said, admitting that initially he didn’t expect them to be state champions.
“The goal is getting better. The goal isn’t necessarily to win a championship, but if your team gets better and improves and makes adjustments, then anything is possible.”
Associate head coach Arturo Jones started working with Morris seven years ago at Leuzinger. He said their coaching system was “birthed” at Leuzinger, then transposed to St. Bernard and Redondo. It’s been astonishingly effective – at three schools in four years they have won three CIF Southern Section titles and now a state championship.
“[Redondo] players bought into the system and they worked hard and they grasped the philosophy, and once we started winning it just got contagious,” Jones said.
The Sea Hawks ended a 21-game winning streak with a state championship victory Saturday in Sacramento. Photo
One aspect of the system is a focus on consistent defense.
“That’s what we’ve made our name for,” said co-captain Chris Henderson, who on Saturday won a CIF sportsmanship award. “Everybody knows our team is a defensive team. I think people cared mostly about offense last year, but things have changed.”
Morris realized mid-season that if Redondo Union held opponents to 60 points or less, a win would almost surely result. At the South Sectional finals, they held high-flying Westlake, averaging 78 points, to only 63, forcing them into 17 turnovers with relentless defense.
“We win ugly. That’s how we play,” Morris said after that win. “We’ve been in many of those. We’ve learned how to make ourselves win, no matter what we have to do.”
Jones believes strong defense won the Seahawks the championship game.
“They didn’t win offensively. They found ways to score but won the state title because they played hard defense,” he said. “That’s what we did, night in and night out. Defense.”
Junior Ian Fox locks arms with a College Park defender during Saturday’s Division II championship game in Sacramento. Photo
Morris and his fellow coaches also raised the standard of fitness, running strenuous workouts on the beach and jogs in the sand; entered the Sea Hawks into highly competitive tournaments; and made team bonding a priority.
“Last year I feel like everybody was more playing for themselves and kinda out to get theirs,” Fox said. “But Coach Morris made us turn into more of a family and a team.
“He made us do things outside of just basketball – without a ball in our hand – and we started bonding,” he said, remembering one particular overnight retreat at which Morris encouraged his players to talk to each other about what was going on in their lives. “That kind of made us realize that we’re a team, like a brotherhood, and there’s more to this team than just basketball.”
Hometown history
Saturday’s game was a reminder that there’s more to basketball than just basketball.
For Rob Fowler, class of ’69, it was a chance to watch Redondo finish something his own father started at the CIF championship game in 1943, which the Sea Hawks narrowly lost. For Gary Colquhuan, class of ’71, it was a “piece of history.”
It was nostalgic for one alumnus, a 35-year Northern California resident who eagerly snapped photographs from the front row of a team that represented a hometown he hadn’t visited in 15 years. Behind him, two grinning alumni stretched between them a “Senile Sea Hawks” sign, a symbol of their longstanding support for Redondo athletics.
Redondo Union’s principal, Dr. Nicole Wesley, was in the stadium and wearing her red bowtie, a nod to Coach Morris.
“I’m speechless,” she said after the game. “I’m so proud. [They’ve] just been through so much to get to this point.”
It was a proud day, too, for Shannon Rodriguez, a second-generation alumna who has been an aide, teacher, counselor, and assistant principal at Redondo. Now the school’s college and career advisor, she joined her Sea Hawk father in the Sacramento stadium on Saturday to watch hometown history unfold.
The Sea Hawks ended a 21-game winning streak with a state championship victory Saturday in Sacramento. Photo
“We’ve been waiting for this. We’ve seen so many teams almost get there. You know, in 2002 our team made it to the southern regional finals and that’s where we lost [to Mater Dei]. Every time we get that close I’m still proud but this – I’m tellin ya, I feel like now I can retire,” she said, with a tongue-in-cheek smile. “It’s been done.”
The outpouring of community support, Morris said, turns the title into something that transcends his career and his team.
“It makes it all worthwhile, just people believing and this meaning a lot to other people.”
Saltsman said he believes this is just the beginning for Sea Hawk basketball.
There will be a parade through the city today to celebrate the team’s big win. It will begin at 3:15 p.m. at the parking lot of 200 PCH, circle the high school campus and end with a rally at the Redondo Beach Civic Center.
The crowd went wild when the buzzer signaled Redondo’s first state victory in the history of school basketball. Photo