Brainerd basketball coach Levar Brown talks to his players before practice Sunday at McKenzie Arena. The Panthers are preparing to play a talented Christ Presbyterian Academy squad in the TSSAA boys state tournament in Murfreesboro on Thursday at 1:15 p.m. CT.
Brainerd’s back.
In the Class AA boys state basketball tournament, that is.
For the Panthers of coach Levar Brown, who is in his second year at the helm, last season ended with a 50-43 loss to Upperman in the sectionals.
But when the Panthers take the floor at Murphy Center on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University on Thursday for the quarterfinals, waiting for them will be Christ Presbyterian Academy, a team that won back-to-back titles in 2012-13 and lost in last year’s semifinals.
The top-ranked Lions (31-4) come into the state tourney riding a 20-game winning streak and are about as familiar with MTSU’s “Glass House” as they are their own gymnasium.
Brainerd (22-7) is making its first state appearance since the 2008-09 season when it was thumped by Booker T. Washington, 61-36, in the semifinals.
“That’s a tremendous advantage for them,” Panthers coach Levar Brown said Sunday afternoon prior to the team’s practice at McKenzie Arena on the Tennessee-Chattanooga campus. “I want to say their entire team is back from last year except for one or two players (actually, junior Braxton Blackwell is the lone returning Lions starter). I know they’re going to come in there hungry because for all practical purposes they were upset last year.
“I’m pretty sure they’re still not too happy about that, and that could be dangerous for us.”
After beating Upperman, 73-39, in last year's quarterfinals, the Lions dropped a tough 59-57 decision to Jackson South Side the semifinals. CPA defeated JSS, 63-42, for the 2013 championship.
The Panthers, who won state titles in 1984, ’88 and ’92 and finished second in 1995 and ’97, believe they can play with the Lions this time around.
Their two main concerns are the 6-foot-8-inch Blackwell, the state’s No. 1 small forward prospect for 2016, and Tyger Campbell, a 5-11 point guard rated by some recruiting services as the country’s top-ranked eighth-grader who averaged 35 points in the summer seventh-grade nationals.
With four CPA players in the state championship football game, Campbell scored 18 points against La Lumiere (LaPorte, Ind.), the country’s fourth-ranked team at the time, despite La Lumiere’s defensive focus squarely on him.
Campbell already has college offers from Ole Miss and Western Kentucky.
In CPA’s 85-75 double-overtime win over Memphis Southwind in the Penny Hardaway Hoopfest, Blackwell, nephew of former Virginia All-American Ralph Sampson, had 28 points and nine rebounds and Campbell tossed in 24 points.
It’s truly a dynamic high school duo.
At 14 years old, Campbell is a social media phenom as well with 1,727 followers on Twitter.
“I know they’re very good,” Brown said of CPA. “We know they’re very disciplined and shoot the ball extremely well. We have to guard the 3-point line in a major way, but we’ve had to do that in our last couple ballgames, so that’s not foreign to us.
“The big kid (Blackwell) is very athletic, he’s long, and he’s skilled. I thought he was primarily a post player, but he can do a lot of other things. He’s going to be a very tough guard for one of our kids. This will be a very tough opener for us.”
Blackwell is the top scorer from last year's squad, which lost six seniors. Micah Davis, now a senior, was the next-highest scorer behind Blackwell in 2013-14 with a 3-point per-game average.
Da’V Moore and Dajuonta Ross, two of Brainerd’s top defensive players, will have their hands full with a CPA squad loaded with talent and coached by Drew Maddux, a former star player at Vanderbilt.
“As soon as we get in the gym for practice we stretch and then it’s defense, defense, defense,” said Moore, a senior. “I have a lot of pride in my defense. I go hard at it every day in practice and in all my games.”
Moore said his best two defensive efforts of the season were the first District 6-AA win against Central and the sectional triumph against Cannon County, which propelled the Panthers into the state tournament.
While many players like to light up the scoreboard offensively, Ross puts his focus on defense with good reason.
“Defense wins games,” he said, “and that’s why I love defense the most.”
The Panthers’ Kentrell Evans, a sophomore, is a pretty good point guard himself and his skill as a floor general and ability to provide offensive punch at critical times in a game will certainly be put to a stern test on Thursday.
Evans credits Brown and assistant coach E’Jay Ward for improving his point-guard skills and enabling him to earn the starting job.
“I don’t care about scoring,” Evans said. “I can score, but my strength is getting everybody else involved. When a team adjusts to other players like Da’V and Marques Tipton, I understand, as part of my role, I need to get some points.”
The Panthers clearly are getting a strong dose of confidence from their second-year coach, an inspirational 36-year-old with reasons to feel blessed.
Brown, played basketball at Tyner, attended MTSU and began teaching at Brainerd in 2003. Two years later he began a two-year stint as head basketball coach at East Lake Middle and 21st Century.
He later became an assistant coach with the Panthers and after five years in that capacity got his current job.
Brown’s playing career was cut short when in January of his senior season at Tyner he was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the same heart condition that killed Boston Celtics captain Reggie Lewis while casually shooting hoops in 1993.
“Once my mom caught wind of that (the heart problem), that was the end of my basketball playing days,” Brown said.
So, it’s easy to understand the 36-year-old’s passion for his current coaching duties and the excitement he’s projecting to Brainerd’s proud program.
The foundation Brainerd put down last season served as a springboard for this team’s drive to the big TSSAA basketball stage in Mufreesboro.
“I really feel like our motivation this year was losing in the sectional last year,” Brown said. “That woke up my players, especially those who were going to return as seniors. We took some things for granted last year and didn’t want to have that feeling again this year.”
Brown said players took a month off after the loss to Upperman, but have been in the gym Monday-Thursday and on Saturdays ever since. Most of the Panthers are one-sport athletes and focused entirely on basketball all summer and through this season.
“Our kids are competitive,” he said. “They are hungry and go after each other pretty hard every day in practice. And, we’re more close knit than before. I told them we had to be a family off the court before the on-court stuff would work.”
The Panthers battled Central all year long and that by itself was rare. In 25 years prior to this season, the Pounders had won twice against Brainerd, both under former coach Bill Nelms, whose last win in the one-side rivalry was a 58-48 decision in January 2004.
Brainerd then ran off 17 consecutive wins until the Pounders won 71-55 in a Christmas tournament at Chattanooga State. Central won twice more to claim District 6-AA and Region 3-AA tourney titles as the teams met a total of five times.
Brown’s Panthers didn’t fold their tents, though.
Brainerd rebounded from the district loss to beat Sequoyah and Hixson in the regional tournament and got another crack at the Panthers in the championship game, which Central won, 53-44, forcing the Panthers to travel to Cannon County for the sectional game, where a win would push the winner into the state tourney.
“We were definitely exhausted from weather delays and tough games in the region,” Brown said, “and then we had to get on a bus for a 2-hour trip to Cannon County. The only reassuring thing about that was we saw them in our hall of fame game (a 70-58 Panthers victory).
“We were going into a hostile environment, but knew what to expect. We were down at halftime and like we have all year we opened the third quarter playing well, went on a 14-3 run and just managed the game after that.”
Brown said Evans displayed usual grit in sparking the Panthers in that comeback.
“He grew up right before my eyes and it was amazing to see,” the coach said. “The game was in his hands. I could have sat down and not said a word to the team the rest of the way. It wasn’t the first time he did that, but it was the first time on a big stage like the sectional. He had a game like that the first time at Central and I think he had 26 points. He scored 35 against Hixson in the region semifinals, but it was awesome to see that in the sectional game.”
It appears that Evans’ confidence has grown as he’s matured throughout the season.
When asked if he and the Panthers can hold up, especially on defense, against CPA, he said, “It won’t be easy, but I think we can do it.”
(E-mail Larry Fleming at larryflemng44@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @larryfleming44)