Shooting Stars win back-to-back I.S. 8 crowns

The Queens-based Shooting Stars, coached by Karriem Memminger, won their second consecutive spring I.S. 8 crown Sunday afternoon, outlasting the New Jersey-based Playaz Club Seniors, 122-104.
St. Benedict’s star and Jamaica native Samardo Samuels scored 29 points en route to MVP honors and Long Island City product Devin Ebanks added 26. Christ the King’s Erving Walker, who was named the regular season’s Player of the Year, added 16.
Many have called the Shooting Stars the best collection of talent in the tournament’s history, lofty praise considering the greats that have graced the South Jamaica court. Made up of nine prominentmajor Division I-bound players, including a frontcourt - Samuels (Louisville), Ebanks (West Virginia) and Ed Davis, a 6-foot-8 power forward from Richmond, VA who will attend North Carolina - that could all realistically find their way to the NBA one day, they earned the top seed and finished undefeated.
“I’m happy we won, happy we all got scholarships going to school for free,” Ebanks said. “It was a lot of fun. Not so much fun for the other teams, but that’s the way it goes. I think it’s unfair, but, hey, you got to deal with it.”
Other teams in past years said Tom Konchalski, the local recruiting analyst, enjoyed better chemistry because they were not just a collection of raw talent, but played together in other tournaments. There has been better high-end talent, too, he said. One year, Lamar Odom, Speedy Claxton and Khalid El-Amin of the Long Island Panthers knocked off a Riverside Church team led by Elton Brand and Erick Barkley. Yet, this championship game, with 14 college-bound prospects between the two teams, including the starting five from St. Anthony of Jersey City, the reigning USA Today national champions, superseded any of that.
“This is probably the deepest talent,” Konchalski said.