Walters Made a Point at the Line

In basketball manuals, the area is known interchangeably as the free-throw line or the foul line. To players, however, it is simply “The Line”--that 12-foot-long black stripe 15 point-blank feet from the basket, a place where players’ souls are often tried.

With five seconds to play in Antelope Valley High’s game last Friday night, the soles of Chris Walters’ high-tops were on the line. And so was the game.

“Nobody,” said Walters, a 6-foot-2 senior forward for the Antelopes, “likes to be a choker at the line.”

A packed gym--so packed that Antelope Valley school officials thrust open the ceiling transoms to allow the chilly high desert air to sweep through the stuffy arena--was in a frenzy. Ventilation did little, however, to soothe Walters as he flexed his knees.

“I was burning up in there,” he said.

So, too, must have been Coach Skip Adams, whose Antelopes had kept their collective finger in the dike as Quartz Hill mounted a fourth-quarter rally in the Golden League contest. Now, with Antelope Valley leading, 78-76, Adams gnawed at a fingernail as Walters, the team’s leading scorer, stood poised.

“ ‘Can’t miss it! Can’t miss it!’ That’s the way I felt,” said Walters, a 60% free-throw shooter this season. “I just felt that I am expected to do certain things on this team. If they try to stop me by fouling me, then I have to come through. I am a senior and I couldn’t be cracking under pressure.”

Walters, who made seven of eight free throws, netted both shots to cap a game-high 35-point performance and lift the Antelopes to an 80-76 win and a 3-0 league record.

“I felt pretty confident that he would make them, especially the first one,” Adams said. “He’s not a good free-throw shooter, but he’s a good free-throw shooter if it’s a clutch situation. I think he just bears down a little.”

Walters, who mixes lightning moves to the baseline with a deadly outside jump shot, has more than compensated for any shortcomings at the line.

He has scored more than 30 points seven times, including 34 in a 66-41 win over Saugus last week. He has scored in double figures in all 19 of Antelope Valley’s games and has not been held to fewer than 14.

In December, Walters, who has signed to attend Texas El Paso next season, was selected most valuable player of the Cerritos-Gahr tournament. He was also named to the all-tournament team at the Hart tournament.

Last summer, Walters was recognized among the top 15 players in a 450-player national high school basketball camp at UC Santa Barbara--a festival that he commuted to and from with Gabe Higa of Quartz Hill High.

The two are friends, so Walters expressed empathy for Higa after last season’s league player of the year missed the second of two free throws with five seconds to play in a one-point loss to Palmdale.

“It’s much harder to make the first one, but I think he may have made the first one and then felt all that pressure,” Walters said. “He was down by two, so it was more of a thing where the spotlight was on him. It was running through his mind, ‘This is to tie it. This is to tie it.’

“He just missed it. Nobody’s perfect.”