CHSAA Media Day Interviews: Cardinal Spellman

Описание: In another one of our interviews from the CHSAA Media Day from this past fall at Mount St. Michael Academy, we got to speak to representatives of Cardinal Spellman in head coach Maurice "Mo" Hicks and assistant coach Ralph Menar and two players in senior guard Jariel Reyes and freshman forward Josh Marcelin.

Hicks, who was hired this past summer, is a coaching legend in the New York City basketball scene, as he is one out of a few coaches to have won a championship in the PSAL and the CHSAA.

A 1981 graduate of the now-defunct Rice High School in Harlem, he was a standout in the CHSAA as a player and that in turn, earned him a scholarship to play at Loyola University (MD) in Baltimore, where he graduated in 1985. Then from 1990 to 1994, he went on to be a head coach at Louis D. Brandeis High School (now known as Louis D. Brandeis Educational Campus) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, whom he led to the PSAL championship in 1992.

After Brandeis, he went on to his alma mater, Rice, where he led the program from 1994 to 2010, where he built a national powerhouse year in and year out and led the Raiders to six CHSAA city championships (1996, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2006 and 2009), two Catholic state championships (2006 & 2007) and five New York State Federation championships (1996, 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2009).

From Rice, he went on to coach at the collegiate level at St. John's University and at LIU Brooklyn most recently. Now that he's back on the high school level, he has inherited a young program that has plenty of talented young players that have a chance to make an impact in the CHSAA B division, including freshman sensation Jamier Peters, a talented young guard from the class of 2029 who is on the way to being an All-League selection by the end of the season.

In this interview, the two players talked about playing for the CHSAA Hall of Fame and Hicks spoke about what was to come in his first season, as well as the success of his former Rice assistant Dwayne Mitchell at Monsignor Scanlan, as well as his time at Rice and his thoughts on the closure of the Harlem school.

On Feb. 24th of this year, he will be inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame.