WEST POINT — The curious question around West Point High School is with all the traditional talent surrounding the football program, why hasn’t that athletic ability translated the basketball gymnasium.
Brad Cox is starting to answer that question by proving it can and should. His evidence is the fact his program won the Region 2 championship, the school’s first district title since 1989. It’s that historic run that led to the second-year coach being named The Dispatch’s Area Boys Large School coach of the year.
“There’s no reason we can’t be successful every year and we’re going to start proving that with our summer workouts,” Cox said. “These kids work out together consistently and are on the same page building this into something year after year after year.”
The strange winding road of West Point’s season ended with the Green Wave’s overall record being under .500 at 12-14 after losing several non-district games by less than five points.
“It took us awhile to gel together and we lost some close ones on a back to back nights,” Cox said. “I was staring at a down locker room and told them ‘you’re a really good team and eventually we’ll put it all together’. When we did that, we got hot at the right time of the year.”
Cox works in an athletic department where his boss, athletic director Chris Chambless, has won five district titles in the past eight years, but Cox thinks he can turn the basketball program into one that hangs more district title banners and can attract capacity crowds. On a January night against rival New Hope High School, Cox saw the crowd and his kids rise to the occasion of the opportunity.
West Point jumped out to an 18-3 lead and coasted to an 82-59 victory that led to their district title. West Point led by as many as 30 in the second half and had the crowd chanting ‘overrated’ to the New Hope team that came in leading the division standings on that night.
“A lot of the guys on this team are the same guys that I coached in ninth grade basketball and they started on that night believing in themselves,” Cox said. “So many times coaches say that the kids believed in what the staff was doing but here it was just about the kids believing they could do it and win.”
The Green Wave peaked at exactly the right time knocking off New Hope and Oxford to win the Class 5A, Region 2 tournament at Oxford. It was the Green Wave’s first region title since 1989.
Senior Keon McKinney was the team’s top defensive star as Cox gave him each night the responsibility of guarding the other team’s top scorer.
Senior Arrington Lenoir has emerged as the team’s secret weapon off the bench.
“We scheduled the Starkville’s, Tupelo’s and Abderdeen’s for a reason because we said if this part of the year is hard then our district should be easy,” Cox said. “That’s why our overall record will probably never indicate how good our season is going.”
Cox was able to rely on the six seniors on his 2012 team to that championship and a major part of that resurgence was the play of senior point guard Cortez Malone. The 6-foot-2 co-captain on the Green Wave team and was a major offensive weapon with dribble penetration on a inconsistent outside shooting squad.
“Our leaders and seniors saw the expectations of the program get higher and higher so it wasn’t a shock to them when it started to happening,” Cox said. “What we’ve now got here at West Point is a lot of sophomores and juniors that were around for what happened this past season and already started working on 2013.”
Cox knows that the 12-14 record does give him a coaching point and motivating factor heading into the 2012-13 season where he plans to tell his team they’ve got a bunch left to accomplish before this group of players graduate.
“We have a lot of guys that watched what was accomplished and are saying we can top that,” Cox said. “We simply ran into a hot Provine team in the tournament. We plan on being the hot team next year with a lot of weapons.”
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