Sure, they kept score in The Classic Saturday night with Team Central Virginia beating Team 434 67-58 in the first Central Virginia All-Star game held at Covenant.
But the score didn’t matter much at all, what mattered was that some of Central Virginia’s best basketball players were sharing the floor together and having a blast doing it. One of the best moments? Josh Colon, Blue Ridge’s 5-foot-9 point guard, elevating in the paint to try and block his long-time teammate for the state champion Barons’ Aamir Simms, who was thundering in for a dunk. That led to the 6-foot-8 Simms, who won one of the game’s MVP awards, stalking and then staring down Colon on the trip back up the court.
“That’s our last time wearing a Blue Ridge uniform, we’re going to have as much fun as we can have,” Colon said. “I knew I was not going to block the shot, I was just trying to make a highlight for him, I knew better. I was just trying to make it fun, give myself a chance for it.”
It was the first time that a number of those players had shared the floor in their high school uniforms, but it wasn’t the first time several of them had played together. The game reunited four members of the Charlottesville Dream, a travel basketball outfit from this senior class’ eighth and ninth grade years that included Simms, Albemarle’s Austin Katstra and Jake Hahn and Monticello’s Ukari Brooks. That team also included local standouts like Jayden Nixon, Matt Palumbo, Ryan Ingram and Malik Barbour. Getting four of them back together sharing the court was clearly a fun way for that group to wrap up their high school careers.
“We haven’t played together all through high school so it was just a lot of fun just to play with them,” Katstra said.
That wasn’t the only connection between players who hadn’t seen each other on the floor in high school. Covenant’s Sam Walkup and Tristan Rogers, Western’s Austin Cress, Katstra and William Monroe’s Anthony Terry, who won the other one of the game’s MVP awards, all played together in youth basketball. It also featured three of the area’s most productive senior tandems in AHS’s Katstra/Hahn, Monroe’s Terry/Kam’ron McCain and Blue Ridge’s Simms/Colon, split between different teams. Throw in players like Western’s Josh Coffman, Charlottesville’s Jaylen Hudson and Khalil Vest and Miller’s Josh Leak and it was a nearly full representation of this year’s senior class.
Because of leagues like VABA and travel basketball, there’s a lot of familiarity among local high school players even when their schools don’t play each other, and seeing that kind of community on display for a night seemed to be a fitting finish to several big-time careers. Now those players will mostly move on to college, either to play basketball or attend school, but for a night they were all together for one last event.
“We all know each other and we’ve played with or against each other for four years so to just have a laid-back game was a lot of fun,” Katstra said.
