Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  The Saintz had the ball to start, and as Evans brought the ball into Team Cal’s half, he didn’t see Demetrius across from him. Instead, he spotted G.J. and Justin atop the 2-3 zone. Across the gym, Daniels shouted, “Why, Joe, why? Let them play, dawg!” and Mats sighed. Making matters worse: On Team Cal’s first offensive series, Demetrius retreated to the low block, a friendly place in part because Evans passed him off to one of the Saintz’ interior defenders.

  “Look at that,” Mats said. “Demetrius is struggling, so where does he go? Down to the block. See, when he was younger, that is where he would get all his points. He was taller than everybody else, could jump higher; he could score at will down there. But he’s not taller than everybody anymore, and let’s face it, he’s not going to be six eight or six ten. He’s a guard, and Joe needs to start preparing him to play on the perimeter.”

  Mats shook his head as Demetrius had a shot blocked by a Saintz forward. “These boys need to start getting prepared for what they are going to face a year or two from now. Demetrius, Aaron, all of them—they need someone to put them in a position where they are learning what is best for their future.”

  Team Cal finally came out of the zone with twelve minutes left, but it was Justin, not Demetrius, who stepped up to Evans. On the Saintz’ possession, Evans dribbled over to where Demetrius stood guarding another player. He had that player screen Justin in a way that would usually force a switch on defense. But when Justin called for the switch, Demetrius stayed with his man. Evans looked at Demetrius and shook his head. Then he drove at Justin, who managed to force him into an awkward shot that he missed.

  Realizing Demetrius wasn’t going to engage him, Evans left the game and gathered his gear and walked up into the stands. Mats hurried over to him. “For business reasons, this didn’t make sense,” he said, and he explained his logic while Evans listened attentively.

  Even with Evans out of the game, Demetrius only tried to score down low, and he managed only a single basket in the second half as Team Cal lost 87–47. Evans scored 32 points to Demetrius’s 9, and although there were only two instances, both in the first half, when they went head to head, a consensus was reached quickly by those in attendance, one that would spread on message boards and in articles on recruiting websites: The East Coast kid had come to play, while the West Coast phenom shied away.

  Keller was full of excuses after the game: Evans and the Saintz were a year older; Team Cal was tired from the three games played earlier in the weekend; Demetrius’s back was bothering him; he stayed in the zone because it wasn’t fair to pit Demetrius against Evans when he wasn’t 100 percent healthy.

  On the drive to the airport, Demetrius blamed Keller for being “too negative” and Aaron for being “too soft” and said, “I’m not going to win a game by myself against kids who are already in high school.”

  What would people say about his matchup with Evans?

  “Nothing. He’s a grade older. It’s not like we are going to see him at Nationals. This game, it’s not even like it really counts.”

  21

  Team Cal’s stars: Aaron Moore, Demetrius Walker, and Roberto Nelson in 2005

  Everywhere Demetrius went, the question followed him, as constant as the recruiting letters that arrived daily in his mailbox: “Where are you going to high school?”

  Dexter Strickland asked him in New Jersey. “I don’t know. Maybe Oak Hill [Academy, in Virginia],” he responded. One of his neighbors raised the question while Demetrius stood in front of his house. “I think Fontana [High]. I’m not sure.” Asked one Tuesday afternoon in February when his teammates were in school, he said, “I don’t know, but I’d like to know. Ask Coach Joe.”

  Eight months from beginning his freshman year, Demetrius, like any kid, thought often about the leap from middle school to high school. He was excited, anxious, curious. But unlike most kids his age, he didn’t know where that leap would take him. His future was wrapped up in what Keller called “My High School Master Plan,” but like most of Keller’s plans, it was subject to change without warning and had already been through several drafts.

  When Keller first formed the team, he spoke of his intent to send several of his players to the same high school in the Inland Empire. The “core” of Demetrius, Rome, Andrew, and Jordan would enroll together, all start as freshmen, and win multiple CIF Southern Section championships and a state title or two. When Andrew and Jordan left the team, Keller plugged in Terran and Justin and eventually Aaron. “It will be like the Fab Five of high school classes,” Keller said.

  Keller promised the kids to several local high school coaches over the years, usually in exchange for free use of their gyms. It didn’t cost the high school coaches anything, and catering to the needs of AAU coaches had become part of the job. Behind some of the most successful programs in Southern California (and across the country) was a grassroots coach. Pat Barrett was an assistant under Gary McKnight at Mater Dei when SCA’s first star, Tom Lewis, enrolled there. In 2005, one of the elite players being guided by both men was forward Taylor King, a top-25 recruit. At another famed private school across the country, St. Anthony’s in New Jersey, coach Bobby Hurley, Sr., benefited from a pipeline of kids from the Playaz, the state’s premier AAU program, run by Adidas coach Jimmy Salmon.

  As Demetrius received more fanfare, Keller altered the High School Master Plan. “I’m going to move my family to Virginia in a few years,” he said one afternoon in April 2003, a few days after Carmelo Anthony led Syracuse to a national championship in his one college season. Anthony had attended Oak Hill Academy in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, the nation’s premier prep school and the alma mater of more than a dozen NBA players. “D’s going to Oak Hill, and I’ll have to move there to keep an eye on him.” But the success of the Jr. Phenom Camp scuttled that plan, as Keller needed to live near the camp’s base in Southern California. He couldn’t become the Sonny Vaccaro of middle schoolers babysitting Demetrius in Virginia.

  For a brief time, Keller considered sending Demetrius to one of the top programs in Los Angeles or Orange County, where he would face the best competition. Mater Dei’s connection to Barrett ruled that school out, but public-school powers such as Westchester, Compton Dominguez, Fairfax, and Taft were options. Those schools had open enrollment, meaning any student could attend as a freshman regardless of whether or not they lived in that school district, and they also made exceptions for star athletes. They routinely fielded teams with five or more kids who lived outside their boundaries, many of them directed there by an AAU coach. Sending Demetrius to one of those schools, however, would mean surrendering some control over him. The coaches there would demand a power-sharing agreement: Keller could continue to be Demetrius’s surrogate coach and train him during the spring and summer, but during the high school season he would not call the shots. Complicating matters was the fact that those schools had their own sponsorship arrangements, and Adidas would not want one of its prized prospects at a Nike or Reebok school.

  In New Jersey, before Mats addressed what high school he thought Keller should pick for Demetrius, he asked, “Are we talking about what school is best for the agenda or for the objective?”

  The objective was: make Demetrius a better basketball player. To achieve that, he needed a high school coach with a history of preparing kids to play in college and the NBA, and also one who would monitor his academics. The objective, however, often takes a backseat to the agenda, Mats explained. Keller’s ideal school included a coach who would give him unfettered access to the program, where Demetrius would be the best player on the team the minute he walked on campus, and where he would be featured in a manner befitting the top-ranked player his age in America. Adidas would sponsor Demetrius’s high school team, so it needed to be a good flag-bearer, too, winning big tournaments and doing well in the playoffs. “If Joe is thinking about exposure for Demetrius when he chooses a school for him, or about Adidas, he is putting him at risk,” Mats pointed out. “Often, all exp
osure does is expose a kid.”

  The perfect school for Demetrius, Mats believed, was right in his backyard: Etiwanda High, on the border of Fontana and Rancho Cucamonga. Coach Dave Kleckner had led teams to the Southern Section finals four times, and in 2005—when the “High School Master Plan” was on everyone’s mind—he sent Darren Collison to UCLA and Jeff Pender-graph to Arizona State. His abilities as a tactician were unassailable; UCLA’s Ben Howland praised how his players were ready to play defense in college, and Etiwanda had one of the best academic reputations among the schools in and around Fontana.

  “That’s a proven program with good players, so Demetrius wouldn’t be forced to do it all by himself,” Mats said. “No freshman dominates against high school juniors and seniors, and people forget that one reason these kids look so good in the spring and summer is because their teammates [on the AAU teams] are so good. Also, don’t remove him from his safety net. He lives close by. He’s got his mom, his friends; that is a good thing. It will make the times when he struggles easier to overcome.”

  But Kleckner didn’t fit with Keller’s agenda. He favored upperclassmen; even Collison didn’t make varsity as a freshman. Etiwanda already received shoes through Collison’s coaches at the Inland Empire Basketball Program (IEBP), an Adidas-sponsored team, but he wasn’t beholden to them. Once, when the IEBP coaches complained about the lack of gym time he afforded them and threatened to stop giving shoes to the Etiwanda team, Kleckner said, “Fine. We don’t need them.”

  A coach who couldn’t be bought or influenced, who felt no player was bigger than the program, and who wouldn’t build his team around a freshman—that was Keller’s nightmare. “No way I would send D there,” he said. “Anybody who sends their kid to Etiwanda needs to have their brain checked.”

  That would include, evidently, John Finn, who filled out transfer papers for Jordan (he lived outside the Etiwanda district) at the earliest allowable date. Not long after, he ran into Keller at a tournament and told him Jordan would be playing for Kleckner. “That’s a huge mistake,” Keller said. “Jordan won’t even make varsity as a freshman.”

  Later, John said, “Hearing Joe say what a bad move it was, that convinced me it was absolutely the right move.”

  In the first three months after Tom Reasin took over as principal of Fontana High in April of 2003, he expelled seventy students. Another 110 were ousted by the end of his first year, and that was just the froth of troublemakers roaming the halls of the 4,000-student school. Two months before Reasin arrived, a schoolwide protest of a change in the lunch schedule led to nine students being arrested, including one for spitting in a police officer’s face. A brawl between Latino and black students had taken place a few days before, a somewhat common occurrence at the tightly packed school, which was built in 1952 to accommodate 1,800 kids. The unruly students included members of the school’s athletic teams. In 2001, a melee had broken out during a soccer game between Fontana and Rialto High. Two years earlier, a Fontana football player punched an opposing assistant coach after Fontana lost a playoff game.

  The disciplinary problems were compounded by the school’s poor academics. Fontana—known as FoHi throughout the Inland Empire—qualified as what one Harvard Civil Rights Project termed a “dropout factory” and finished below the state average in tests for reading, math, and English comprehension. During one three-year period, the percentage of tenth-graders considered proficient in mathematics went from 14 percent to 10 percent to 8 percent.

  After moving into his office in the FoHi’s concrete-walled main building, Reasin looked up the grades and disciplinary files for the varsity basketball players and was stunned by what he found: In one year they had accumulated seventy “referrals”—instances when a teacher or administrator flagged them for improper behavior—and several should have been ruled academically ineligible to play. Teachers later told him that the varsity coach pressured them to give his players passing grades.

  Reasin fired the coach and chose Corey Hogue, the coach at nearby Pacific High, as his replacement, saying at the time: “[Corey’s] very concerned with the ethical part of coaching and character-building, as well as developing high esteem in the athletes.”

  Hogue was tall and thin, with brown hair and an easygoing manner. While at Pacific, he’d let Keller use the school’s gym free of charge in the hopes of landing Team Cal’s phenoms. He was not naïve, but it was easy to see why Keller mistook him for an innocent. He was calm and a good listener and inherently trusting, hints of his small-town roots as the son of a high school basketball coach in Lubbock, Texas.

  After Hogue was hired at FoHi, Keller became a regular at the school. He charmed Reasin, and the two went out to dinner regularly and talked on the phone every few days. Keller told him of the big crowds that would one day come to see Demetrius in high school, and that FoHi was in the running to land him. Keller was not merely laying the groundwork for a power play. He liked Reasin, and in a sign of their burgeoning friendship he hired him to do the marketing for the first Jr. Phenom Camp.

  In the young stars of Team Cal, Reasin saw a chance to return FoHi to the glory days of the 1980s, when the football program was a national power and kids felt pride in their school. The football team averaged at least ten victories a season during the mid- to late 1980s and won section titles in 1987 and 1989. That success energized the school and a community still recovering from the closing of the Kaiser Steel plant in 1983. Fontana could have become a western version of Rust Belt relics like Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, as more than half of its residents took paychecks from the mill, but the city’s population jumped from 35,000 to 70,000 between 1980 and 1987 as a development boom lured Los Angelenos to the area. Talented athletes who would have played for Dorsey, Crenshaw, Inglewood, and other inner-city schools ended up at FoHi, and the football team became the centerpiece of the community in a manner most often seen in small towns in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

  To keep up with the influx of new residents, the Fontana Unified School District opened A. B. Miller in 1991 and Kaiser High in 1998. This signaled the end of FoHi’s football dynasty, as the new schools diluted the talent pool.

  By the time Reasin arrived in 2003, the football program was a lost cause. The basketball team, on the other hand, had the potential to be a source of self-respect for the kids and the community. It had happened before, in 1996, when six-foot-six guard Corey Benjamin, a top-10 recruit nationally, led the school to a section title before heading off to Oregon State and, later, the Chicago Bulls. “The basketball team can be the foundation to get that Steelers pride back,” Reasin said. “If you add Demetrius and Aaron and others kids who are great athletes but also good students, that sends a strong message to the rest of the student body.”

  Hogue’s first team finished 20–9 and lost in the Southern Section quarterfinals to Long Beach Poly. By any measure it was a successful season, but a few weeks after the final game, Reasin informed Hogue that he “didn’t like the direction the program was headed” and stripped him of the coaching job.

  There were various explanations for why Hogue was let go after a single winning season. The public line was that Hogue “resigned to explore other opportunities.” Keller said Hogue’s “conduct” toward other teachers led to his dismissal, which Keller knew because Reasin had consulted with him before the firing. Hogue believed that Reasin was doing Keller’s bidding, that they had another coach in mind for when Demetrius got to high school. “If my conduct was the problem, why was I allowed to continue teaching until the end of the school year? Why did I then get asked to teach summer school?”

  A few months later, the High School Master Plan took a turn that bolstered Hogue’s suspicions: Mark Soderberg became the new basketball coach at FoHi.

  Soderberg always looked on his stint coaching Team Cal as short-term, as if he were a veteran political consultant brought in for the final push that wins a campaign. Playing the calm sage to Keller’s bombastic neophyte was no dream job, and so
after Nationals he thought he would move on, perhaps to a career outside basketball. Then, late in the summer, Keller called: “What about the job at FoHi?”

  Soderberg was initially resistant. The school was forty miles from his home in Lake Elsinore. He did not have a teaching credential and would be considered a full-time substitute, which paid only $100 a day. Even with a coaching stipend, he would make less than $20,000. “It was by the grace of my wife that I took the job,” he explained. “She said, ‘You like coaching these kids, Demetrius and Aaron and the rest of them, so forget about the money.’ ”

  Soderberg’s hiring was an indelible revision to the plan. Keller couldn’t back out of sending Demetrius to FoHi after persuading Soderberg to take the position. Gang problems, overcrowded classrooms, poor academics—none of it mattered. Demetrius was going to FoHi. The question became: Which of his Team Cal teammates would join him?

  When the team traveled to Portland in February, talk about who would attend FoHi dominated the downtime between games. The speculation continued in the months after, and from day to day it was hard to keep up with the rumors: Rachel was moving to Fontana after Keller lined up a job for her and promised to help pay her rent; Bruce would become one of Soderberg’s assistant coaches, move to the Inland Empire, and enroll Roberto at FoHi; Barbara was moving into the Fontana district, the only holdup being the percentage of her rent Keller would pay to make it happen; Rome, Sr., wasn’t sure about FoHi for Little Rome, but his mom, Sharon, had overruled him, and he would continue as Demetrius’s running mate through high school.

  When questioned about their intentions, most of the parents didn’t have an answer. They liked the idea of keeping the team together, but FoHi’s gangs, racial makeup (it was 80 percent Hispanic), and poor academics troubled them. For Carmen, Bruce, and Rachel, committing to FoHi meant either moving to the Inland Empire or a grueling commute for their sons each morning.