Feeling of Family Is Deep-Rooted Among Players at Lincoln High

It began four years ago.

Carl Gaines would burst into the gym wearing his best I’m-really-sorry-I’m-late look. Lincoln’s freshman basketball coach, Hosea Hall, would be waiting for him.

“I had to go to the store for my mom,” Gaines would say.

He might as well have started running laps when he walked in. Others might have been convinced; Hall would know he had been at a girlfriend’s house.

“Do you know that he called my mom to ask if I had gone to the store?” Gaines said. “He always knew when we were messing around.”

The team responded by performing on the court, going 30-0, averaging 90.5 points a game and giving up about 50.

Gaines and the others would get together at his house and talk about winning a section title.

They won one two weeks ago. On Saturday, they will play for the championship of the state.

Lincoln (26-2) will play Daly City Jefferson (32-1) for the Division III championship at the Oakland Coliseum Arena Saturday at 12:45 p.m. Five players from that 1984-85 freshman team form the varsity’s nucleus in 1988. Three are starters; the other two are the first players off the bench.

They grew up in Southeast San Diego, an area Lincoln Coach Ron Loneski has called “a tough place for a kid to grow up in.” But they say playing under Hall helped them stay out of trouble.

“Hosea pretty much raised us,” Bernard Dickerson said.

As much as he tried, Hall did not have that effect on every member of that team. Joe McDowell was a 6-foot point guard who could almost dunk as a freshman. Hall said he eventually dropped out of school.

“He was an incredible player,” said Hall, now an assistant varsity coach. “He comes and stands at the door (at games), but he won’t come in. It’s got to be hurting him that he can’t be a part of this because he would have been.”

Being a part of this is why Gaines, Dickerson, Kenny Hawkins and Ellison Hawkins (they are not related, but everyone seems to call them “the Hawkins brothers” anyway) have been able to keep focused on school, basketball--and their friendship.

“We look out for each other,” Dickerson said. “Especially when it comes to school.”

“We’re a union, real buddy-buddy,” Ellison Hawkins said. “We’re like one strong muscle.”

Roger Johnson was on that team as well but strayed occasionally. The force of the friendship reeled him in, the others say, and now he’s as straight as they are.

“It took Roger awhile to get into me and Kenny and the other guys,” Gaines said. “He was a different dude. He partied a lot. He wasn’t focusing on his class work. But he’s probably my closest friend on the team now.”

Gaines and the Hawkinses actually started playing together in the sixth grade at the Jackie Robinson YMCA near Lincoln. They played on a team there for a coach named Willie Green.

“We had just a so-so beginning,” Ellison Hawkins said. “We were 5-12. We were a bunch of goof-offs. Willie tried to teach us fundamentals, but we thought it was a joke.”

That changed under Hall. He stressed fundamentals. No one dared laugh, either.

If a player showed up with dirty socks, he ran laps while the others practiced. Ellison Hawkins showed up at a game on the road wearing the shorts that go with the home uniform. He sat on the bench.

“At first I hated it,” Kenny Hawkins said. “He made us run lines and do defensive drills and laps for hours.”

But off the court, they grew to love Hall.

“He was like our second father,” Dickerson said.

Gaines tells another story of how he went Hall’s home to eat dinner.

“He said I was the first player he had invited to his house,” Gaines said. “What I remember most was when he sat me down after dinner. He told me I had leadership qualities. I said, ‘I can’t be a leader. I’m just one of the guys.’

“Hosea and I used to get in arguments about it because I was an arrogant freshman who thought I could go and play for anyone.”

In the end, Hall was right. Gaines is now the team captain.

But the role ends when the players step off the court. All said there never have been leaders in their group. No one is exempt from ribbing or being told to shape up.

Take Gaines. He had been on the honor roll, like the others, at Gompers Secondary School. But he started to neglect his schoolwork when he got to Lincoln. Basketball was all he thought about, he said.

“The other guys are the ones who got me out of that,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Carl, let’s go back to doing the stuff we used to do.’ ”

Johnson is perhaps the best example of the power of this peer pressure. He was ineligible for much of his sophomore and junior years. This year, he made the honor roll for the first time. That success has a lot to do with his friends.

“We’d talk to him a lot and tell him to get his head straight,” Dickerson said.

Said Johnson: “I’d get mad sometimes, and they’d come and pick at me so I’d get rid of my anger. They’d understand where I was coming from. We’re like a family.”

Those same feelings extend to the basketball court.

Said Gaines: “We’re fortunate like that. There is no one who has bad vibes toward someone else. In Texas (Gaines lived in Texas during his sophomore year), I’ve seen guys fighting because someone missed a shot and someone else said something about it. Not on our team.”

That may be because everyone gets his shots. Gaines is the leading scorer at 19.4 points per game and had a season high of 28. But Johnson scored 28 in a game this season, too. So did Kenny Hawkins. Dickerson scored 20 in another. Aaron Wilhite and Joe Temple, juniors who played under Hall two years ago, have game highs of 28 and 21 this season.

The seniors are used to such balance. The same thing happened when they were freshmen.

Lincoln’s penchant for scoring points in bunches was also born on that team. But, Hall said, there was a lot more to that team than big numbers.

“They were so intense,” he said. “Bernard and Carl, Roger blocking shots, Kenny playing tough defense. But they liked each other so well, too.”

They had other things to think about--and a few friends to make sure they didn’t stop.