How a coach’s legacy and an unlikely swim team helped Stranahan boys end basketball title drought
The first state-championship season in the history of Stranahan boys’ basketball began in June in the newly renovated swimming pool at the Fort Lauderdale high school.
When the Mighty Dragons’ 2018 season ended, Terrence Williams knew how his second campaign as the coach at his alma mater would start. To get over the hump and win Stranahan’s first state title in any sport since 1975, the Dragons would have to get tougher and get in better shape. Williams had an out-there idea: He would make Stranahan’s boys’ basketball team into its swim team.
“How can I change the whole perspective?” he said Thursday.
It all paid off in Lakeland. Playing in their first ever state-title game Thursday, the Dragons won a slugfest against St. Petersburg Lakewood, 63-54, in the Class 6A championship at the RP Funding Center. Lakewood, which has four players 6-foot-5 or taller, tried to win with brawn. Stranahan, led by 14 points from star 5-9 guard Brian Dugazon, won with might.
It was a fitting way for it to come together for the underdog Dragons. Stranahan (27-6) was a perennial afterthought in South Florida before this postseason run. The Dragons don’t have a legacy of Division I talent or a culture of consistent winning. Stranahan built an unlikely foundation from the bits and pieces of history that could be found around the athletic program, and the school as a whole.
The first part was Keith Skinner, who coached the Dragons for 30 years before dying of cancer in 2017. Williams, who played for Skinner when he was a student at Stranahan, took the reins with a singular mission. The Dragons made it to the region final last year in Williams’ first season as coach, then set their sights on a state championship in 2019, playing the whole time in Skinner’s memory.
“He would’ve loved to see this moment,” Williams said. “For us to get it while he’s gone, it’s kind of bittersweet. We finally did it.”
The other parts are Williams and Stranahan’s swimming program. Williams was an obvious successor to Skinner because of his history with the program, but he was actually a swimmer before he played basketball — he even appeared as an extra in “Pride,” a 2007 film about an all-black swim team. The Dragons’ loss to Leesburg in the Class 6A-Region 4 championship last season was a blowout and by the end of the game Williams was already thinking of ways to get his team tougher for 2019, so in June he restarted Stranahan’s dormant swim team, took over as the program’s coach, and got all 12 of his players to fill out his roster. About half, he said, couldn’t swim. Most of the rest didn’t have much of a technique.
Nothing could have prepared them better for the Spartans (27-4) and the state-championship stage.
“It’s all good,” Dugazon said. “I ain’t get tired.”
The game was rife with dives for loose balls, in-air collisions around the rim, and enough grabbing and pulling to fill a wrestling ring. After the two teams were only called for only nine total fouls in the first half, Lakewood got into the bonus by the 3:17 mark of the third quarter, but the Dragons never wavered. Stranahan took a seven-point lead into halftime and led for the entire second half, throwing outlet passes and scoring on coast-to-coast layups to outrun its bigger opponent.
The closest the Spartans got was 49-47 after a free throw.
With three minutes remaining and a three-point lead, swingman Daquion Vickers missed a free throw and Inady Legiste rose through Lakewood’s trees. The 6-6 post player, who scored 12 points and grabbed nine rebounds despite fighting foul trouble, pulled in an offensive rebound and threw in a putback off the glass to stretch the lead to 53-47. Most of the final minutes turned into a celebration for Stranahan.
The Dragons pulled in everyone they could find for postgame photographs on the court — the principal, the cheerleaders, some of the parents and fans who made the trip up from Broward County. The school will get to hang a banner for only the fifth time and for the first time in 44 years.
“I don’t even know how to explain this I’m so happy right now,” Legiste said. “We weren’t supposed to be here tonight. Nobody believed we could do it, but we believed in ourselves. It’s not just the school but so many other people, the alumni, the administration, the teachers, the community. Everybody around us fought for us so we wanted to pay them back.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2019 at 9:33 PM.
