Redskins have solidified themselves as the best ever

The last time I wrote about Fort Wayne North Side’s basketball team, it was the day of the Summit Athletic Conference Holiday Tournament finals. In that blog, I compared them to the last team to win said title, in the 2006-2007 season.

North Side beat Snider that night on a thrilling buzzer beater. Since that time, they have gone 13-1 and improved their record to a state best 21-1 for the regular season. Their lone loss? A tough road match up where their two brightest stars sat out the vast majority of the first half in foul trouble.

Tonight, that same North Side team plays Snider again. This time, it is the opening round of Sectional play. 21-1 is nice and all, but a loss for either team tonight ends their season. And it ends a lot of careers.

For North Side specifically, this is the final run for four starts and their 6^th man. Tonight and the remainder of their season will be all in for Tre’vion Crews, Mike Davis, Oosha Mitchell, Jeremy Jones and Myluv Sutton. But what stands out to me as we enter the postseason, no matter results tonight or down the line, is that this North Side Redskin team has every right to claim themselves as the best team to lace up their sneakers for the school since it opened in 1927.

Not just one of the best. They have the legitimate argument for THE BEST.

I am a North Side basketball purist. I may very well be one of the foremost authorities on the history of the program. I have loved to study the program since I was in school at North Side and carried over more strongly when I was a coach in the program between 2003 and 2008. And there have been some extremely talented teams: runs at state titles in ’33, ’55 and ‘65, the all-time winningest team in 1978, a state-ranked 1999 team that fizzled out too early and a trifecta of 15+ win teams from 2005-2007 at the peak of modern day local prep basketball.

What makes them possibly the best overall is hard to quantify outside of numbers. But those numbers do not lie. They will, no matter what, be the first team in school history to finish with less than 3 total losses. They will, no matter what, end with the best winning percentage in school history. 1978 be damned, North Side has already done almost everything better than that year, widely regarded as the best year ever.

When you look at “modern day” North Side, we can call it the post-By Hey era, there have been five really good years and two squads stand out the most before this group.

The 1999 team was ranked 7^th in the state heading into the post season but faltered after a Sectional win. However that team, led by still professionally playing Vernard Hollins, set a standard for modern day North Side. Run and gun benefited this team greatly. Getting out on the break with Hollins, Quincy Rutledge, Tyone Little and Wes Williams was practically impossible for most other schools. And if they could slow the Redskins down, the 6’10’’ junior center Ross McGregor wasn’t exactly easy to stop when he wanted a basket or a rebound. They boasted the 5^th best winning percentage in school history, complete with SAC regular season and Sectional titles. It was a blueprint, a foundation, as a high bar and stepping stone for other North Side teams in the post-By Hey Era.

Then from 2005-2007, North Side stepped all over it.

Never with a better record, but with one of the best three-year runs in school history, the Mike Novell coached squads (with a common denominator in Eshaunte “Bear” Jones) were the talk of the area at a time when the area was at its best. Every school had a strong piece or two at that point. South Side with Juston Hairston and Fred Ford, Snider with Marques Johnson and Ryan Sims, Concordia with Brandon Knox and Kyle Pressley, Harding with Evan White, DeAundre Muhammed and Pryce Underwood, Bishop Luers with Kevin Fogler, Bishop Luers with Cory Howard, Troy Amos, Lawrence Barnett and later Deshaun Thomas. Fort Wayne alone was the who’s who of prep basketball.

And North Side, win or lose, always stuck out. They overachieved into a Sectional crown in 2005, underachieved with only a conference regular season title 2006 and peaked early in 2006-2007 by winning the Holiday Tournament and never getting more than a sniff of any other crown from there on out.

All of these teams were good, but none do what this year’s team does: they quite frankly, are the epitome of consistency. You could break it down player by player as I have done in the past and this year’s team would win some and lose some. But as a team, as fun as those other teams were…could they handle this group?

Part of that is their maturity and part is how well they gel. North Side has the area’s best point guard (and in my humble opinion best player) in Tre Crews, the best inside presence in Mike Davis and a complimentary core of guys who would be the best player on any other team. And there are not egos. Well, I am sure there are egos, but they never show them. One guy may want the ball more than he gets it, but come game day, they show no cracks like that, no little nuisances that naturally inhabit high school teams. When it is game day, only one stat matters: that their side is lit up a little more brightly on the scoreboard, that their opponents cannot finish with more points.

The last time North Side played Snider, I thought they were playing to be the best in the program’s history to win that tournament crown. Tonight, they have nothing to prove. This North Side team is as good as it gets and they don’t have to prove that to themselves or anybody else.

The best part of that? I think they already know they don’t.