It has been said that the best athletes are basketball players.
To succeed at the game, a basketball player needs to have hand-eye coordination, speed, quickness, strength, stamina and the will to win.
Mater Dei’s Stanley Johnson possessed those qualities in abundance. He displayed those qualities consistently.
The best basketball player in Orange County for the 2013-14 school year was also the best athlete in Orange County. Johnson has been selected the Register’s Athlete of the Year.
What a year it was for the 6-foot-6, 225-pound senior who could play guard, forward or wherever he was needed.
He was the Register’s Orange County basketball player of the year for the second season in a row, and the CIF-Southern Section Open Division player of the year.
He was the Gatorade state player of the year, Cal-Hi Sports state player of the year and MaxPreps national player of the year.
ESPN rated Johnson as the top prospect in California and the No. 7 prospect in the nation.
Johnson, who has signed to play at Arizona next season, was selected to play in the McDonald’s All-America game. He impressed observers there with his defensive effort in what usually is a free-wheeling offensive game.
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He showed his diverse scoring ability in some of the other all-star contests. Johnson had 24 points, on 10-for-18 shooting, in the Jordan Brand Classic, which featured some of the nation’s best players. He scored 43 in the Ballislife All-America Game.
And Johnson did a lot of winning. He led Mater Dei to a 35-0 record, the CIF-SS Open Division and CIF State Open Division championships, and Mater Dei was No. 1 in several final national rankings.
The state championship was Johnson’s fourth in his four years at Mater Dei. The Monarchs were 135-7 over his four seasons.
“Stanley’s talent level and his will to make sure we win was second to none,” Monarchs coach Gary McKnight said. “At the same time, he was able to work with other guys on the team to get them involved and was even like a coach at times.”
Johnson scored 25 points in the Monarchs’ 71-61 win over Bishop O’Dowd of Oakland in the state final.
He scored 28, more than half of his team’s total, in a 48-44 win over Chino Hills in the CIF-SS Open Division final. He made eight free throws in a row in the fourth quarter and was 13 for 16 at the line for the game.
Johnson liked the big regular-season games, too. On back-to-back nights of the Nike Extravaganza, “the last big hoo-hah before the playoffs” as Johnson called it, he scored 34 points with 10 rebounds in a win over Village Christian of Sun Valley. He followed that with 27 points, nine rebounds and five steals in a win over Whitney Young of Chicago.
He played point guard for the Monarchs. It is not his natural position.
It was something Johnson did not do by choice, but by necessity.
“That’s what our team needed me to do,” Johnson said.
He averaged 25 points, along with eight rebounds and three assists.
Now he’s off to college. There is a lot of speculation that Johnson will enter the NBA draft after one season of college basketball. That could happen if he has a heck of a freshman year at Arizona.
Johnson sure did have a heck of a senior year at Mater Dei.
Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com
