Monarchs’ Reversal of Fortune

H ELP WANTED: Immediate opening 4 basketball player with exceptional skills. Got a velvet touch? Can leap out of gym? Contact G. McKnight. Must be ready 4 commitment.

Boy, ever think the day would arrive when it was time to feel sorry for Gary McKnight and Mater Dei? OK, maybe it still hasn’t.

Hard to imagine McKnight landing anywhere but on his Nikes. But as Schea Cotton moseys off into the sunset, we wave goodby with the thought: They don’t make basketball factories like they used to.

In three years, three Division I prospects bid adieu to McKnight and Mater Dei. All for perfectly understandable reasons.

1993--Olujimi Mann transfers to Santa Ana Valley because of money.

1994--Chris Burgess heads to Woodbridge because he reads the graffiti on the wall.

1995--Cotton returns from whence he came--Bellflower St. John Bosco--because his family needs to be closer to the family business.

Bet there’s hardly a dry eye in Orange County, eh?

Well, maybe what goes around comes around. Anybody out there remember Tom Lewis? Mike Mitchell? Stu Thomas? LeRon Ellis? Reggie Geary? All found their way to Mater Dei from other schools. Ah, but the door seems to swing both ways these days, with so many marquee players leaving for so many reasons.

The Manns said they couldn’t afford the $3,000-plus tuition. He’s not alone. Cotton received a scholarship--for lack of a better term--to help cover the $3,000-plus annual tuition.

So Mann toddled off to Santa Ana Valley and made the Falcons a power.

No problem. The Monarch talent pool was still crowded, maybe too crowded. But McKnight has handled this balance of power before. Long gone, he has said, are the days one player had free rein the way Lewis did in the mid-1980s. He’d become an equal opportunity coach. Yet, Cotton was given a similar license to thrill.

That left Burgess scratching his head. He was part of a freshman unit known around Mater Dei as the Fab Five, a tight, share-and-share alike group. Then came Cotton. Three years of playing defense and collecting rebounds so Cotton could run amok on the other end? Who couldn’t see that billboard-sized writing?

So Burgess bolted to Woodbridge and returned the Warriors to prominence.

But, hey, no worries around Mater Dei. The Monarchs still had Cotton.

Ooops.

Mater Dei has gathered players from beyond the county before. But the commute seemed too much for the Cottons, who relocated nearer the family business.

Here was the most prominent sophomore in the country at one of the most prominent programs in the country and the act couldn’t endure a little distance. Instead, Cotton made a bee-line back to St. John Bosco, where he had created such a buzz by leaving three weeks into his freshman season.

Seems there were philosophical reasons--the Naismith, not Nietzsche, type--back then. St. John Bosco has the same coach, but everything has been smoothed over. A fine example of letting bygones be bygones.

Now everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone. McKnight recently told a county coach that Cotton was worth 70 victories the next two seasons. Maybe so, but not for Mater Dei.

Oh well, these things happen.

Why even Lewis--a Monarch assistant who transferred into and stayed at Mater Dei--is looking to leave the womb. He has applied for assistant jobs at UCLA and UC Irvine.

HELP WANTED: Opening for assistant basketball coach . . .