By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
There isn’t much that hasn’t already been said about Hattiesburg’s amazing run to the Class 5A boys basketball state championship.
About the 41-year drought between state championships for the Tigers.
About Ernie Watson’s personal 30-year odyssey to lead a team to an elusive title.
About Watson’s late wife, Renee, who urged her husband to take the job at HHS, because she said it was a place where he could build a championship program, not long before she succumbed after a long bout with cancer.
About a team that refused to lose and found myriad ways to win when things were looking bleak.
The record will show that Hattiesburg finished the 2022-23 season with a record of 24 wins and 7 losses. All of those defeats came before the turn of the new year, meaning the Tigers won their last 16 games and have yet to lose in 2023.
How did they do it? What combination of luck and (mostly) skill did the Tigers use to get to the point where it was holding up a state championship trophy.
I watched five of Hattiesburg’s last six games, beginning with the Region 6-5A Tournament semifinal against Laurel, right up through Friday’s 55-50 win over Picayune in the final, and I came away with five main factors behind the Tigers’ success.
The first big factor was unity, the team concept that can be elusive on talented teams. This team bought into the team concept in a way that Watson has not seen in his 13 seasons at HHS
It’s a concept that Watson has always preached, but he’s never had a team that listened like this bunch. As he said after Friday’s victory, “When they start listening to me and doing what I tell them, we start playing well again.”
Watson has had more talented played than anyone he put on the floor this season, guys such as Tristen Walley, Cameron Brown, Nick Walker and Tony Bridges. But those talented players didn’t have the team around them that this one had.
These players took the selfless approach to heart, and it showed on the court. In the five Hattiesburg games I saw, six different players scored in double figures at least once, several more than once.
Junior Stephen McCullon Jr. scored 21 points against Florence, 13 against Canton and 14 against Picayune. Junior Christian Moody had 18 points against Laurel and 11 against Picayune. Senior Kelby McKeller had 12 points against Laurel and 12 against West Harrison, senior Malik Walker had 14 against Canton and freshman Tristen Keys had 12 points against West Harrison.
And that’s not even counting senior Darrian Johnson, who I’ll talk about shortly.
Hattiesburg’s season statistics also reflect this balance. Johnson was the team leader in scoring with a modest 11.2 points, along with 8.7 rebounds, per game (which is not a modest average at all), but the Tigers had four other players average at least 7 points a game.
The point is, players on this team were just as content scoring no points as they were scoring 20, as long as they were able to contribute to a victory in some way. That is often a rare concept for teenagers to buy into, but the Tigers did that and then some.
A second major factor was the play of Johnson. A slender 6-foot-7 who is as a comfortable working the perimeter as he is down in the low post, Johnson almost certainly played his way into a scholarship from someone.
I don’t know if Johnson has the bulk to play Division I, but he certainly has the skills to star for a small college for four years, or star for a junior college and maybe work his way to a D-1 program.
Although the team concept was a big key, a team still needs a guy like Johnson to pull everything together, and he was the glue that kept the Tigers together. HHS doesn’t even sniff the final without him.
Johnson had just 7 points against Laurel, but came alive in the playoffs, in every phase of the game.
Here are his totals for Hattiesburg’s four playoff games:
West Harrison: 15 points, 5 rebounds, 4 blocks.
Florence: 16 points, 13 rebounds, 4 blocks.
Canton: 19 points, 9 rebounds, 3 blocks, 2 assists.
Picayune: 13 points, 6 rebounds, 2 blocks, 3 steals.
Johnson was a force on offense, driving to the basket against smaller defenders for layups or dunks, getting in position for putbacks and displaying a nice little midrange jump shot that was all but impossible to defend.
But Johnson’s biggest contribution was on defense. Because he’s big enough and quick enough to effectively guard the basket, the Tigers didn’t have to double-team every time an opponent drove to the hole, although they could do so when they needed.
Johnson was especially strong when the going got rough, both on the floor and on the bench, scoring, defending and rebounding in the game, and providing invaluable leadership in moments of stress.
It was Johnson who got the Tigers past a rough stretch in the second half in the semifinal against Canton with his play in the middle, and he was the one who addressed his team heading into the fourth quarter with HHS trailing 38-34.
“Man, we were just saying, ‘we’ve got to do this for the community, for the City of Hattiesburg,’” Johnson said in the postgame celebration. “We couldn’t let up. We were just sticking together and staying a family.”
A third, and quite possibly decisive factor was free throw shooting. It’s more than just a cliché, champions make their free throws when the game is on the line. Simple math, really, and Hattiesburg was awfully good at it.
In the second round against West Harrison (the Tigers had a bye through the first round), they were 9 of 15 from the line, but 5 of 6 in the fourth quarter, though that was long after the outcome was settled.
Against Florence, HHS was 16 of 24 on foul shots, including 12 of 14 in the final period. In the semifinal against Canton, the Tigers were 27 of 33 for the game and 11 of 13 in the fourth quarter, and in the final, they were 16 of 19, 8 of 9 in the fourth quarter.
Hattiesburg was a relatively average 64.8 percent from the foul line for the season, but shot 74.7 percent in the postseason, and 85.7 percent in the fourth quarter of those games. You’ll win an awful lot of basketball games shooting 85 percent in the fourth quarter.
A fourth factor in this triumph was knowing when and when not to take 3-point shots. The 3-ball was a major part of the Tigers’ offense this season. HHS took 337 shots from beyond the arc and converted 146 for a healthy 43.3 percent.
Against West Harrison, Hattiesburg was 10 of 22 from the 3-point line, but that was the last game the Tigers played in a high school gym.
The last three games were played in coliseums, Marvin R. White Coliseum at Pearl River Community College for the quarterfinals and the semifinals and final at Mississippi Coliseum, where the roomy shooting backdrop can be a problem for high schoolers.
The Tigers adjusted their offensive game plan to reflect the reality of shooting in a coliseum setting. HHS took 13 shots from 3-point range against Florence and made 4, then shot just 15 times from beyond the arc in the last two games.
Some of those made 3-balls came at very opportune moments, but the point is, the Tigers effectively took a major component out of their offensive repertoire and won anyway.
Finally, and most importantly, the Tigers played killer defense. Except for the third quarter against Picayune, when everything broke down for Hattiesburg, HHS played consistently smothering defense.
In basketball, offense can be fickle, but if you can consistently defend effectively, you’ll usually win more than you lose.
Hattiesburg averaged slightly over 60 points a game this season; good, but not necessarily spectacular. But the Tigers only allowed 50 points per game, which is a remarkably low number even for high school.
The key, as I said earlier, was the ability of Johnson to defend the lane and the low blocks without a lot of help. That left the cat-quick Tiger guards available to harass opponents on the perimeter and get extra hands in the passing lanes.
Hattiesburg averaged almost 8 steals per game, and a lot of those fueled the Tigers’ transition game. And that all goes back to playing as a team, being of one mind and one focus.
Indeed, the emphasis Watson placed on defense this season, was why players didn’t get concerned if they didn’t score. Because they knew that even if the points weren’t coming, if the continued to play tough defense, a victory was the very likely outcome.
As, McCullon said after one of the Tigers’ playoff wins, “I believe we have the best defense in the state. There’s nobody we can’t guard.” He will get no argument from me on that score.
If Ernie Watson decides to retire – to go out on top – he has certainly earned the privilege after 31 years in the business.
Since taking his wife’s advice and accepting the HHS job in 2010, Watson has compiled a record of 226-145, a winning percentage of 60.9 percent. Those are Hall of Fame-type numbers.
But Hattiesburg has a nucleus of talent returning to give Tiger fans optimism about a repeat in 2024 and give Watson the incentive to come back to continue leading the program.
McCullon and Moody will both back, along with Keys, who will get a much larger role next season. Also returning is 6-2 junior forward Logan Burns, who averaged 5.7 points and 2.8 rebounds a game off what was a deep bench.
HHS will have to find replacements for Johnson and Walker, who may have been the Tigers’ best defender. In both of Hattiesburg’s two games in Jackson, Walker played much of the second half each night with four fouls.
Indeed, Watson took a big gamble against Picayune by reinserting Walker into the lineup with four fouls when the Tigers were floundering in the third period and the dream was starting to slip away. He played the rest of the game without fouling out.
It was that kind of senior leadership, the kind of team play, that carried Hattiesburg to ultimate victory, and rewarded the Tiger faithful with a championship run for the ages that wiped away more than 40 years of frustration.
Stan Caldwell is a veteran sportswriter with nearly 40 years working in the Hattiesburg area.
Photos courtesy of Jesse Johnson
