JACKSON — Point guards aren’t made overnight.
As much as coaches would like to think it’s possible, they can’t go into a laboratory and whip up a potion that infuses a player with all of the skills someone needs to play the position.
If an elixir like that existed, Queshod Young gladly would have accepted it at the beginning of the 2014-15 season. With more experience and a greater comfort level as a shooting guard, Young entered the season unsure of what it would take to transition from that role into the starting point guard for the Aberdeen High School boys basketball team.
Young admitted there were lessons learned — as well as plenty of turnovers — in the first part of the season as he immersed himself in all of the subtleties involved with being a floor general.
You only needed to see one play from Aberdeen’s 57-48 victory against Forest on Tuesday to see how quickly Young has applied what he has learned and has taken ownership of his new responsibilities.
With Aberdeen leading 24-14 late in the second quarter, Young attacked Forest’s three-quarter court pressure defense on the right side in the backcourt. Young kept his head up and saw it would be difficult for him to attempt to beat the defenders scattered in front of him, so he turned his gaze to the left and snapped a diagonal pass to Marcus Carouthers. The pass came too quickly to give the defense time to shift and allowed Carouthers to blitz the rim from the three-quarter court mark and drive in for a layup and draw the foul.
“In our first game, I used to dribble with my head down sometimes,” Young said. “At practice, the coaches always tell me to look up and have vision of the court and to always look up when I dribble. When I got the ball, I looked up and scanned the floor and saw him running down and just threw it ahead to him, and he had a lane to the goal.”
Young hopes to find plenty of other lanes to the goal at 4 p.m. today when Aberdeen (25-6) takes on two-time reigning Class 3A champion Velma Jackson in the Mississippi High School Activities Association Class 3A championship at Mississippi Coliseum.
Don’t be fooled by Young’s court vision, though, because he isn’t only a passer. He showed a balanced floor game against Forest, hitting 5 of 8 shots from the field, including 2 of 4 from 3-point range. His biggest field goal might have come in the fourth quarter with Aberdeen leading 43-40. With Forest’s defensive intensity rising, Young beat his defender off the dribble into the lane and scored with 4 minutes, 20 seconds remaining to kick the Bulldogs’ lead to five points.
Aberdeen High coach Jaworski Rankin said Young has handled the pressure of leading a team. He said Young has the speed and quickness to penetrate and draw defenses so he can lay the ball off to teammates for easy layups. Rankin also said Young has the shooting ability to keep defenses honest, which enables Aberdeen to exploit one-on-one matchups with scorers like Carouthers. He said Young has improved “tremendously” since the beginning of the season.
“His confidence is growing,” Rankin said. “You take a kid that never played last year and he is leading us to a state championship game. That is from the hard work he put in every day. He takes coaching. We get on him pretty bad. I know I get on him pretty bad, but he keeps responding. That is a reflection of his maturity and growth.”
Young said it wasn’t hard taking over at point guard, but he acknowledged there was a lot of pressure and that there were times during the season he felt it affect him. He said Rankin and his coaches told him to calm down and to play his game and get the basketball to the team’s scorers.
“Early in the season, a little bit (of the pressure) hit me when we played great teams,” Young said. “I got used to the pressure as the season went on. I played point guard when I was little, so I just had to go out there and play.”
Young credits former Mississippi State guard Phil Turner, who is an assistant coach at Aberdeen High, for working with him last summer and pressuring him to help prepare him for this season.
Carouthers, the team’s leading scorer, had a game-high 25 points against Forest, while Young and Trent Davis (13 rebounds) had 12 points. Young also had two assists and two steals in playing all 32 minutes. He had five turnovers, but he didn’t allow any of the giveaways, including some that came against pressure defense, to deter him from his mission of leading the team to the state title game.
Today, Young said he will try to see the court and to distribute the ball in a similar fashion to keep Aberdeen clicking. If needed, he said he will do his part shooting, too, to stretch the defense and to help the Bulldogs realize the goal they set at the beginning of the season.
Young said he will do all of those things with his head up so he knows where he is going and where all of his teammates are on the court at all times.
“It makes me feel good to see how much I have improved,” Young said. “I have improved a lot because at first (I wasn’t keeping my head up and seeing the floor). I was doing it, but I wasn’t doing it excellent. Now I see the point of it and now I am doing it every time.”
A point guard couldn’t have said it any better.
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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