LONG BEACH – For seven or so hours Sunday, McBride High was the high school hoops capital of California.
The sixth Kenny Smith/Pangos Guard Camp Workout and the Beach City Hoops/SoCal Invitational drew a plethora of the top high school players in Southern California and beyond.
Notable among those athletes were Eastvale Roosevelt’s Terrific Trio of Class of 2025 guards, Brayden Burries, Myles Walker and Issac Williamson, along with Inglewood junior Jason Crowe Jr.
Those four were front and center in the final action of the late afternoon, with Burries, Walker and Williamson leading the Class of 2025 team that pulled away in the final minutes to knock off Crowe and his fellow juniors, 82-67.
The 6-foot-5 Burries and 6-3 Crowe are consensus Top 15 prospects in their respective national classes, and each provided succinct demonstrations why during that game.
Burries (32 points) and the left-handed Crowe (38) hit their usual quota of high-degree-of-difficulty (for 99.9 percent of the hoopers) shots, often while matched up.
And Walker and Williamson showed why there aren’t better on-ball defenders among preps anywhere in the state.
But it was the 6-1 Williamson who earned “King of the Court” designation, as much for the timeliness of his 30 points – he hit his final six attempts from behind the arc and got into the lane for layups at will. He also defended Crowe about as capably as possible on this level.
Another turning in an impressive performance (as both rebounder and scorer) in the Alex Carmon-fronted BCH event was 6-10 senior Parker Jefferson.
Parker (a transfer from Waxachachie) in Texas) is enrolled at Inglewood where he should combine with Crowe (who spent his first two years at Lynwood before his dad took the job at his high school alma mater) for a dandy inside-outside duo.
Crowe (pictured) and Williamson were also amongst the 22 player who took part in the drills and scrimmaging led by Smith, the TNT basketball analyst and former NBA standout guard who played on Houston’s back-to-back championship teams of 1994 and ’95.
And, since the fundamentals (notably, footwork) Smith was demonstrated at the Dinos Trigonis-fronted camp were universal to basketball and not “unique” to just “guards”, there were plenty “non-guards” on hand.
Among those were 6-5 Hudson Mayes (Redondo); 6-6 Noah Castaneda (L.A. Salesian); 6-6 Caspian Jones (Phoenix St. Mary’s); 6-8 Brayden Kyman (Santa Margarita); 6-8 Jaison Joyce (Gahr, by way of St. John Bosco); 6-9 Dallas Washington (Santa Margarita) and 6-10 Marko Kovac (just enrolled at Mater Dei after migrating from Croatia).
The rest of the crew included Williamson’s brother (Isaiah, a freshman at Los Alamitos); Denis Woods (Bishop Montgomery); Carter Parker (a freshman at Vasquez); Izaiah Fiallos (Rancho Cucamonga); Jaden Bailes (St. Augustine); Shu Kaneko (L.A. Salesian); Dylan Moran (Chaminade); Da’Vian Brooks (Knight); Isaiah Rogers (Corona Centennial); Elias Obenyah (Richmond Salesian); Josiah Nance (a sophomore at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame, by way of Heritage Christian); C.J. Shaw (Las Vegas Mojave) and Malloy Smith (Mater Dei, and of Kenny Smith).
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