By Ed Piper
"NBA ball, you can't even watch it," grimaced University City boys basketball coach Terry Stonebraker as he ferried a visitor around campus on his cart for supervision.
The long-time Centurion mentor, entering his 16th year at the helm of his program, enthused, on the other hand, about his granddaughter, Alyssa Nelson, a junior who just transferred from Stonebraker's alma mater, Kearny, and his grandson, whose name I didn't catch.
Alyssa is "almost six feet", tall like her grandfather, who goes close to 6'5" and is burly. He later introduced me to UC girls basketball coach David Asuncion, Alyssa's new coach in his third year at University City, at offseason workouts.
The Centurion boys are "going to be deep", said Stonebraker, with three key seniors returning, eight seniors in all, and "a lot of guards" moving up from last year's "really good" junior varsity.
"We're going to play La Jolla here January 3," announced the coach. It will be a non-league, rivalry game that should draw plenty of interest from the two schools' respective student bodies, though the rivalry has waned a little in recent years.
The trio of leaders for UC are going to include Kasen Dickerson, a 6'3" point guard; Jalen LeFear, 6'2" wing; and Luke Minnick, a 5'9" guard.
Dickerson's strengths are "ball-handling, court vision. He shoots the ball well--shoots the three really well."
Regarding LeFear, Stonebraker said, ""He's stocky and strong. Plays tough defense. Moves his feet really well.
"He's a physical presence for us on the perimeter."
Minnick "shoots the ball well."
Asked for an example of one of the many guards up from the JV's, the coach offered Wesley Clarkson, a 6'1" junior. "He's a tenacious defender," Stonebraker said.
The coach gave some family history. "I used to be a brick mason (a coincidence with his last name). My dad was a brick mason. He started in Utah. He came here (to San Diego) to build USD. I was four years old. We were always going to go back (to Utah). My sisters entered school, and we never went back.
"They went to Kearny High. So did I. I played basketball there. Alan Trammell (a Tigers Hall-of-Famer at shortstop) was a sophomore my senior year. He also played basketball. He was already a standout in baseball at that point."
We also talked about Stonebraker's former player and long-time assistant, Gatluak "Golly" Lam. He appeared in a story the past summer that touched on his life fleeing Ethiopia, where he was a refugee with his relatives, who are South Sudanese, and his continuing work to formalize a basketball league of South Sudanese young men in their 20's between San Diego, Arizona, Omaha, Nebraska, and Texas.
Stonebraker was JV coach at UC for five years before being named varsity coach for 2004-05.
UC, experiencing a revival last year, was 9-3 in the City League, 19-11 overall. Dickerson, Minnick, and LeFear were 2-3-4 in scoring for the team (after the graduated Casey Granfors) with 11.7, 7.9, and 7.6 points per game, respectively.
Dickerson led the team with 4.7 assists per game. LeFear contributed 2.3 per game, third on the team.
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