By CHRIS MCMANES
Ides of March was definitely not a good day for Julius Caesar. Laurel High School, however, might want to consider making it a school holiday.
For the second time on the 15th of March, the Laurel boys basketball team won a state championship. The latest one came this month in College Park when the Spartans beat Walt Whitman, 68-53, in the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association Class 4A final.
Forty-five years of ups and downs between state titles culminated with Laurel (26-2) cutting down the nets at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Xfinity Center. Seniors Amadou Kaloga, Jermaine Taylor and Christian Brown blazed the path to glory by combining to score 55 points and grab 25 rebounds.
Spartans second-year coach Eric Hines said his players started building toward a championship in 2021.
“They wanted it from four years ago,” he said. Hines also teaches math at Laurel and was a second-year assistant in 2021. “They had an idea and a dream. They believed it, and they chased that dream. That’s what we said, ‘Chase that dream.’ And that’s what they did.”
Kaloga scored a game-high 24 points on 11 of 15 shooting, and Taylor produced 16 points, eight rebounds and four assists. Brown was 7 of 9 from the field en route to 15 points and 13 boards.
The triumph allowed the Cherry Lane squad to avenge its 73-72 loss to the Bethesda power in last year’s state quarterfinals.
The state championship “means everything, especially being with the group of guys I’ve been with [since my] freshman year,” Kaloga told Capitol Hoops. “Definitely credit to my coach because, early on, he kept us all together. And doing it against the team we lost to last year by one [point], you couldn’t write it any better than that.”
Whitman, which saw its 10-game winning streak end, took a 7-0 lead but found itself trailing at the end of the first quarter, 18-14. The Spartans seized control in the second period with a 10-o outburst to double up the Vikings at halftime, 44-22.
Laurel made 11 of 16 second-quarter shots, while holding Whitman to 1-for-14. At game’s end, the Spartans had succeeded on 50.9% of their attempts (29 of 57). Whitman was just 17 of 60 (28.3%) and got out-rebounded 38-30.
Taylor, who was named Prince George’s County 4A Player of the Year, scored a team-best 20.5 points per game. Kaloga, a fellow 6-foot guard, was next at 18.1.
Laurel began the season with five consecutive victories before losing to Bowie, 49-47. It then reeled off 17 straight wins until losing the final regular-season game, 95-72, to 2A state champion Largo.
The Spartans won five games in the playoffs, including a 64-52 semifinal victory over Fort Meade Mustangs on March 12. Taylor paced the effort with 18 points and eight boards against a Mustangs team that had won 21 in a row.
Sports Illustrated named Taylor Most Outstanding Player of the 4A playoffs. Brown and Whitman’s Hayden Walsh (17 points in the title game) made the All-Tournament team.
Despite the Vikings (22-5) playing in their second-straight championship and fourth since 2014, Laurel was confident heading into its first state final in four-and-a-half decades.
“We came in with a good mind,” Brown said. “We had high energy; we wanted this very bad.”
The senior triumvirate of Kaloga, Taylor and Brown reached the goal they set as freshmen: win a state championship.
“Every year, we took another step,” Kaloga said. “All the early mornings [and] late nights; [this] just makes it that much sweeter.”
The Spartans finished 14th in The Washington Post’s final rankings.
Here are some game highlights from DC News Now.
Laurel’s Title Game History
Laurel High School, founded in 1899, advanced to its first state championship in 1957. Its only other crown came on March 15, 1980, less than a mile away from Xfinity Center at UMD’s Cole Field House.
According to a pair of Post articles by Donald Huff, the 1979-80 Spartans had not produced a winning team in 18 years — the school was more known for its wrestling and soccer teams. In the two previous seasons, Laurel had gone 3-19 and 8-14.
“We’ve been slow to catch on,” then-Spartans coach Randy Mattox told the Post. “We’ve … won state wrestling crowns. Basketball hasn’t been very big around here.”
Laurel qualified for the Class AA Final Four with wins over Montgomery County champion Blair, 74-57, and Prince George’s County’s titleist High Point, 79-58.
“The last two games we weren’t expected to win big,” Mattox said at the time. “We went into both games relaxed and loose. We played both Blair and High Point very well. They just cracked wide open.”
The Spartans collected the championship trophy with a 55-49 victory over Suitland. Nolan Gibson scored seven of Laurel’s final nine points to finish with 23. Bernard Mallory hit a 15-footer to put the Spartans on top, 52-48, with 1:26 to play.
