As the ‘A’ division playoffs begin on February 26 and boys’ basketball teams from across New York City travel cross-borough to meet the opposition, one team from Queens, The Courier predicts, will stand out from the rest.
OK, we cheated. They’ll be wearing shirts and ties.
The team is from Richmond Hill, and the head coach, Brian Sutton, has spent the last nine years dressing up the Lions basketball program in more ways than one. Sutton’s basketball players travel in business attire, in the manner of a college team. They are masters of the team-building exercise, visiting Madison Square Garden on Tuesday, February 24, to take in a St. John’s game. They even incorporate a little charity work into their schedules, annually joining the New York Police Department in painting over graffiti in a manner that would make The Courier’s news department proud.
“We do other things outside of normal basketball. For me, it’s about more than the basketball,” Sutton says. “I don’t remember the last time we didn’t do community involvement.”
Sutton is sometimes teased and called “Coach Carter” — a reference to the 2005 flick starring Samuel L. Jackson as an inspirational basketball coach — by those who find his off-the-court tactics kitschy. But his methods seem to be working. On Thursday, when the Lions face down No. 10 seed New Dorp in Staten Island, the journey will mark their first playoff appearance since 2002. (Richmond Hill is seeded 23rd this year.)
Richmond Hill is an up-and-coming basketball program by nearly any standard, and 2008-09 marks a watershed season. The Lions are 10-6, good for second place in the Queens ‘A’ East standings. They are demonstrating a marked improvement from their fortunes over the last five years, when Richmond Hill accumulated a record of 13-61. And they possess three of the division’s five top scorers in junior Daniel Madison, junior Malik Batine, and senior Enle Li.
Madison chalks the success up to team chemistry.
“Since I’ve been here it’s the best chemistry,” he says. “We do things together, laugh, we talk on the phone, we talk on AIM. If somebody falls, we come in and pick each other up.”
What Madison talks about is evident from one’s first exposure to the team. At practice on Monday, the head coach is playfully greeted with “Yo Sutton!” from a couple of players. During warm-ups, laughter is the only sound between each set of 25 pushups. (Sutton has them do 100 in all; he remarks to me that he’s having next year’s captains lead the exercise.) When reminded of the next day’s St. John’s game, junior Abraham Ceballos ribs Sutton by asking, “You’re sitting in the front row, aren’t you?”
The joke is that Sutton was a volunteer assistant coach for St. John’s men’s basketball during the reign of legendary head coach Lou Carnesecca. The away-game dress code is one tradition that Sutton adopted for his high school players. The reactions from those at Richmond Hill have been positive.
“This is something different, and I think their parents appreciate it,” Sutton says. “It’s a different way to carry themselves, a different outlook on life.”
“It feels great. People see you and they respect you,” says Li, a mild-mannered team captain whom Sutton describes as “everything you want in a basketball player and a student [and] who you’d want your child to grow up to be.”
The tradition is particularly novel for junior Leo Esonwunne, who arrived at Richmond Hill this year from Nigeria because his mother wanted him to go to college in the United States. He played outdoor basketball on concrete for his old high school in a not-very-organized league. In Queens, Esonwunne leads the division in rebounds.
“I saw this big kid walking around the school. We don’t get that around here,” remembers Sutton, who received an e-mail from Esonwunne a day later expressing interest in joining the team.
“When I came I heard they hadn’t been in the playoffs for a long time,” says Esonwunne, whose old team won three state titles.
All that will change when the Lions face New Dorp on February 26. The Staten Islanders are favored. Richmond Hill, which typically gets a strong home crowd, is 3-4 on the road this season. Sutton talks New Dorp tactics with his team from the first moments of Monday’s practice, a welcome improvement from a few players’ preliminary research on the PSAL web site.
But Esonwunne is confident that he and his teammates will be wearing their shirts and ties a few more times.
“I have high hopes that we’re going to go in there and win,” he says. “We’re going to make something happen. We’re going far in the playoffs.”
