Sophomore Keith Williams is one of the key holdovers from last year’s Bishop Loughlin’s basketball team that competes in the Diocese of Brooklyn division of the Catholic High Schools Athletic Association. Last year, the Lions just fell short of winning the Intersectional title, and advancing into the State tournament. They lost to a better Christ The King squad in the finals.
Williams and his teammates don’t figure to go this far as most of the players on last year’s team graduated. But they do have several very talented players who can step ‘it’ up. And Williams is among one of them in an effort to help play a team game.
Williams averaged 17 points an outing for a team that has a 9-16 won-lost record, at press time. He scored 21 points against Holy Cross last Monday. But his best game in a Bishop Loughlin uniform came when he scored 28 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in the team’s first game against Holy Cross.
Keith Wiliams, Jr. is the son of Keith Williams, Sr. who hails from Guyana in the Caribbean.
“My father talks to me a lot about the (sport of basketball,)” he said after the team lost to Holy Cross of Flushing, 62-58, in the first round of the CHSAA Diocese of Brooklyn playoff tournament at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens.
Holy Cross has a new head coach for this season in a former player at the same school, Terry Tarpey who coached the Varsity ‘B’ team and teaches mathematics at Holy Cross.
“He (Williams, Sr.) tells me that we can’t win every game (so when we come on out, we play tough). I have to play stronger and go to the gym every day.” Williams Sr. is not into any sports and neither is the wife and mother Yeette Williams. She also comes from Guyana. They both attend the games when they could make it as the mother is a nurse and the father is in construction.
Besides, Williams Jr. and Marques Watson, a point guard, still another soph, and Jordan Thomas, a front court player, are capable of starting. The latter is a sophomore forward.
Thomas, a sophomore forward, on this young team, understood the game a little bit more than some of the other players. Jordan is very aggressive and very tough. Williams scored 21 points in another game. This game was very good and expensive.
“Jordan is very good (at his position),’ said veteran head coach Edwin Gonzalez. “He understands the game better than (last year.) We’ll be fine.”
All the players will be working on improving their skills during the off season and should be ready for the following campaign that starts in November. Coach Gonzalez was most proud of this past season is that the players faced a rough (and re-tooling ) season and still managed to stay together. It’s been a rough season!
“Last year we lost in the championship game, and we came up a little short,” said Williams, who lives in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “This team is young and still talented.”
“We’ll go far in the future and be better than last year’s team. But last Monday we just came up a little bit short and a little bit flat in the third quarter. We stopped playing hard. It was tough to score. We tried to get great shots but instead we forced shots. It’s hard to beat a team three times.”
During the off season Williams will be playing with a travel team in AAU competition.
“It’s fun to do it because we travel and play against top players,” he added. “But the experience is great.”
