Don’t look now, but Mississippi private school basketball has drastically improved
Some familiar and storied Mississippi athletic bloodlines were on well-played display at sparkling Duease Hall/Gymnasium on the campus of Madison Ridgeland Academy Thursday night.
The MRA girls team defeated Jackson Academy 46- 39 and the Jackson boys returned the favor in the nightcap, dominating the fourth quarter in a 59-45 victory much closer than the final score would indicate.
At one point in the girls game, MRA sophomore point guard Presley Hughes dribbled through the JA defense, drew a double team, and neatly dished a perfect bounce pass to 6-foot, 5-inch sophomore Alyssa Dampier for an easy layup. Dampier, the long-limbed daughter of 16- year NBA veteran Erick Dampier, didn’t have to reach far to lay it in. Hughes is the daughter of Whit Hughes, Erick Dampier’s teammate and sixth man on the fabulous 1996 Mississippi State SEC Champion and Final Four team.
There’s lots more: In the boys game, Mike and Mason Williams, sons of the great NBA star Mo Williams, combined for 40 points, 25 rebounds and seven assists to lead the JA boys to their 28th victory against one defeat this season. Like father, like sons. Mo, now Jackson State’s head coach, averaged 13 points and five assists over a 15-year NBA career. Mike, a junior, scored 29 points, many on assists from Mason, a sophomore, who scored 11. Both are highly skilled, tremendously athletic youngsters who look and play a whole lot like their daddy. That’s a good thing, especially for second-year JA head coach Jesse Taylor.
And that’s not all. The most amazing part of the evening was watching 13-year-old eighth grader Erick Dampier Jr. who scored 18 points, grabbed nine rebounds and blocked three shots in a losing cause for MRA, where his famous father serves as an assistant coach. Yes, Erick Jr. is 13 years young. Yes, he’s in the eighth grade (straight A student), playing on the varsity team against guys anywhere from three to five years older. Did I mention he is 6 feet, 9 inches tall and growing like a springtime Mississippi weed?
Says MRA boys coach Richard Duease, the second winningest high school hoops coach in America and namesake of the gymnasium: “Erick was the top-ranked seventh grader in the entire country last year. He’ll be the top-ranked eighth grader this year. You ought to see him when he plays against kids his age. It’s not fair.”
You can look for much more in the coming days and weeks and years on young Dampier, but there was something else on clear display at MRA on the first day of February 2024, and that’s just how much better private school (MAIS) basketball has become in recent years. That’s largely because MAIS basketball has become exceedingly more racially integrated.
You can make a good case that two of the best three high school basketball teams in Mississippi are private school teams. JA appears the best. MRA isn’t far behind. Pascagoula, which handed JA its only loss this season, is topranked by most polls.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that MAIS basketball is the best it’s ever been,” said Duease, who will enter the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame this summer. Duease would surely qualify as an expert, his teams having won 33 state championships in his 49-year career in the private schools league. “Obviously, JA is really good, and we’re good, but this league is tough everywhere you go. Prep’s good, Hartfield is really good. St. Joe is good. There are good teams outside the metro area, as well. There are no easy outs. The entire landscape of high school basketball in Mississippi has changed.”
No question, in games matching public and private schools this season, the latter have won by far more games. That’s new. In the recent Rumble in the South at Mississippi College, Jackson Academy blew out Class 7A public school powerhouse Madison Central 80-48, MRA knocked off perennial Class 4A power Raymond 50-48, and Presbyterian Christian of Hattiesburg defeated Provine 60-55.
It’s not just in boys basketball either. The MRA girls have defeated Gulfport twice, Hattiesburg and Raymond and own three victories over Memphis city schools.
In the academy league, nearly everywhere you look, Black players are making a huge difference for winning teams. Back when Whit Hughes starred at Jackson Prep in the 1990s, the only time he played against African Americans was in the summer leagues.
MRA got its first Black player in 1995. Duease received a call from Chareck “CC” Cable, who played at Clinton High School but wasn’t getting the playing time he desired. He told Duease he’d like to transfer to MRA. Duease talked to both Cable and his mother, explaining that he would need to take an entrance exam and what the costs would be should he make the needed score. Cable, who is now the assistant principal at Clinton Junior High, easily passed the exam, entered MRA and became one of the Patriots’ best players.
Nearly three decades later, Cable is back in Clinton as an administrator and remembers that time between his junior and senior years of high school. “I just wanted to play basketball, and if I transferred to another public school I had to sit out a year, which I didn’t have,” he says. “It turned out well for me. I was accepted and treated well.”
Duease remembers Cable’s first game as an MRA Patriot at East Holmes Academy, which had actually threatened a couple years before to cancel a football game because a rival had welcomed a Black player.
“We were playing at East Holmes and I told our players on our first possession I wanted to set up a for a backside screen for C.C., and I wanted him to tear that rim down,” Duease said, chuckling at the memory. “Well, he darn near did tear it down. Got everybody’s attention. I think he dunked it five times in that one game.”
The integration of athletics in the private schools league, spotty at first, has become exceedingly more common in recent years. The result is a much higher level of play, from mostly below the rim to now often high above it.
Rick Cleveland, a native of Hattiesburg and resident of Jackson, has been Mississippi Today’s sports columnist since 2016.