Wildcats eye a repeat

It took 83 years for Winter Park High School to have its first boys basketball state championship. Now the Wildcats are hoping it’ll only take a year to win their second.

The team is by many measures stacked beyond seven players deep with talent that could easily see them to the championship. Three of them are Division I prospects. One is an All-American.

But individual talent doesn’t necessarily make a winning team.

“We’ve got the talent,” Head Coach David Bailey said. “I just don’t know if it’ll mesh.”

Up until five months ago, four of the Wildcats’ top players had been playing for other schools.

Only two Wildcats were starters last season. And those two know what it’s like to have all the weight of a championship resting on them. Or maybe it’s the bull’s-eye on their backs.

The Wildcats don’t have much left to prove, if a state championship trophy qualifies as the end all, be all of high school basketball. That didn’t stop Bailey from looking for a bigger challenge. The only problem: He found it before he found his team.

Over the summer, the Wildcats came together in a series of surprises few could have predicted. A string of transfers, one by one, filed into the Winter Park front office looking for a new school. Lucky for the Wildcats, they knew a thing or two about basketball.

Enter Michael Marlano, hailing from Australia by way of John Wall’s Word of God Christian Academy in Raleigh, N.C. The 6-foot-9 junior can play post and shoot long, giving a perplexing threat to an already deep arsenal of Wildcat players.

Another trans-oceanic expatriate, John Williams helps add to the Wildcats’ ever-increasing height advantage, towering at 6-foot-6.

Driving to the post, BillyDee Williams’ energetic style works every time. He took the cross-county transfer trip from Evans High.

But the most telling product of the Wildcats’ drawing power could be a former nemesis. Austin Keel was a key player standing in between Winter Park and a championship last season during the regional quarterfinal round. Playing for Winter Springs, he had averaged nearly 14 points per game all season, with an uncanny ability to bury outside shots.

After Winter Park blew past Winter Springs, four Bears starters hung up their jerseys. Then head coach Travis Jones resigned. Keel was all that was left of a playoff team decimated by lost seniors and without a coach.

To see it from his perspective, he only had one choice.

At the moment he strolled onto the Winter Park court in June, he was being recruited by a reported 50 college teams.

Building team cohesiveness from a new group of players could easily be an issue when trying to repeat a state championship, but thanks to summer youth basketball putting players together from around the area, that’s not much of a problem for the Wildcats.

“We’ve all played together since we were kids,” Keel said. “They were really happy I was here.”

Now that team is seeing if it can jell in the early games of the season. So far they’ve found a way to jump out to a 4-1 start, falling only to national-level powerhouse Dr. Krop.

It only gets tougher from here. Of the 25 teams they’ll face, 19 are nationally ranked. At the City of Palms Tournament, 10 state champions will hit the courts.

“We could go .500 and still win state,” Bailey said.

That’s the kind of pressure that senior Brett Comer, who along with Rivers is the only other returning starter, is used to. Last season, with a schedule that was also stacked with top teams, the Wildcats prevailed.

“We lost a lot of big games and still won it all,” Comer said.

Rivers said that when the pressure’s on, the Wildcats will come together.

“The bigger the game, the better we are,” Rivers said. “We always rise to the occasion.”