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Murrell, McCarter, Carolina, Allick, and Stewart, still a team.
Greg “Buckets” Jones.
When Chaz, Chazz, De’Arie, Mike, and Chris heard that a train had killed their star point guard, they decided it was time to suit up.
Only this time they weren’t suiting up to shoot hoops. They planned a way to remember Greg “Buckets” Jones — and keep alive a dream they all shared.
Jones, 28, died on April 14 in a gruesome accident in GIllette, Wyoming. A train crew discovered his decapitated body on the tracks; he’d been struck by an earlier train.
Now his former Hillhouse High School teammates — Chris Murrell, Chazz McCarter, De’Arie Allick, Chaz Stewart, and Michael Moore — have organized two fundraisers to help the Jones family with burial costs and hope to launch an athletic scholarship in his memory. (The second fundraiser starts at 5 p.m. Thursday at Roosevelt’s, 754 State St.; the funeral starts at 8 p.m. with a viewing, then the memorial service, at 8 a.m. Saturday at Morning Star Freewill Holiness Church, 125 Dixwell Ave.)
“I can’t call this a ‘reunion,’ because we never left” off working as a team, said Chris Murrell, who learned of Jones’ death a day before the birthday of his son, who was Jones’ godson. “We always stayed tight. Each of us since high school has been looking out for each other.”
And pursuing the same dream. Though the dream has evolved over the years to include more than basketball.
It began as your basic boy’s dream: To make it to the NBA. They all had that dream when they started together in the West Rock Hot Shot summer basketball camp for 7 – 15 year-olds. They chased it together as varsity basketball players at Hillhouse High School. Over four years they learned to work together as a team. They were good enough at it to capture the 2006 statewide high-school trophy, New Haven’s first Division 1 basketball championship in 19 years.
Jones, the team’s point guard, both stood out on that team, and helped bind it.
They called him “Buckets” because of his sharp shot. He was the team’s MVP that championship year. He broke a school record by scoring 40 points in one game, including 12 three-pointers.
“In front of over 10,000 people at the University of Hartford [for the championship game], the lights on, bright, the guy knocked down seven three-pointers. It wasn’t just seven three-pointers. It was seven for seven,” recalled Kermit Carolina, who coached the Hillhouse team and ran the summer basketball camp.
“He used to step over the half-court line and shoot,” Murrell recalled.
“Literally,” added teammate De’Aire Allick.
“They had to D [guard] him, pick him up at half-court.”
Jones, an intense competitor on the court and a quiet friend off, could have “scored 40 points in every game,” Carolina recalled. Instead, he shared the ball and the glory.
“All these guys sacrificed for a bigger goal. They wanted to be champions. They put their egos aside,” Carolina said. “Greg was the catalyst for that — for being not the best player, but the most unselfish player.
“It was infectious.”
Life Intervenes
The ‘06 team at its prom.
All continued playing ball for a few years after graduation. They started college; some obtained degrees. And life intervened, along with the need to make a living. They gradually realized they weren’t going to win the NBA lottery.
Murrell decided, for instance, that he needed to focus on being a good father. “I realized that I don’t have to be an NBA player to be looked up to by my son.” At 27, he is coaching the basketball team at Platt High School while running a personal training business called BoPro Fitness.
Allick’s brother Donell (a standout basketball player himself) was shot dead in New Haven in 2011. Allick decided to dedicate his time to steering young New Haveners out of trouble; he founded a not-for-profit called Fearless Motivational Builders. The organization has put together street clean-ups and a basketball tournament in memory of Donell.
McCarter played some ball for Gateway and Southern Connecticut. Then he landed a job in patient transport at Yale-New Haven Hospital; he volunteer coaches for Hillhouse’s JV squad on the side. He also just got married.
Moore played ball at Fordham and Hofstra. He continues to pursue the hoop dream while studying for his masters in education.
Greg “Buckets” Jones, meanwhile, played some college ball, including in Wyoming. He came back to New Haven, then left again for Wyoming in 2011, along with former teammate Stewart, to play semi-pro ball in the ABA league.
The league didn’t work out for them. Stewart returned home to New Haven, found work as a painter, while volunteering as a coach for Hillhouse as well as for a local AAU team.
Buckets stayed in Wyoming after landing a good job on the railroad, his friends said.
They all kept in regular touch, often by phone or Facebook. Buckets’ friends said he planned to return home once he had saved enough money from the Wyoming job. Then disaster struck.
Buckets’ sister called the teammates the Wednesday morning after the body was discovered.
“We’ve got to do something,” they remembered thinking. They called each other. They contacted Carolina, with whom they all stay in touch. They came up with the plan to raise the money for the funeral and to start the scholarship.
Plan B
Victory night.
Doing so would honor the evolution of their original NBA dream. From the start, back in the summer camp, Carolina had drilled into them the notion that, while aiming for the NBA, they should aim for a higher goal: representing themselves and their team in a respectful way, and pursuing a meaningful life in a focused way. He drilled into them the need to have a “Plan B” — just in case the NBA didn’t come calling.
In the camp, Carolina drew on estimated numbers to drive home the point: Maybe five million American kids a year hope to become the next (in those days) Michael Jordan. They spend six to eight hours a day working on their game, the way these New Haven kids did.
Maybe 500,000 of those five million kids would make their middle-school team, Carolina told them; maybe another 100,000 would make their high-school team. Maybe 10,000 would advance to college ball, maybe 3,000 of them on Division 1 teams.
Of those 3,000, maybe 300 would be invited to the NBA draft camp in Chicago, maybe 30 drafted, in the first round, maybe three receive a guaranteed contract.
Meanwhile, thousands of other kids each year would become doctors, dentists, business administrators, or other professionals earning just as much as the typical NBA player — each year for decades, not just for the seven years of a typical NBA career.
“You don’t want to kill the [NBA] dream. I don’t think it’s my job to be a dream killer,” Carolina said. He drove them hard to focus as a team on winning the high-school championship, for instance. Meanwhile, he emphasized, as Murrell remembered it, that the quest was “bigger than basketball. “‘Don’t embarrass our program,’” on or off the court.
At the camp and then at Hillhouse, Carolina urged them to keep working hard on their game — and spend half of those six to eight hours on school work instead of basketball. Just to have a Plan B.
As they discussed Buckets back at Hillhouse Wednesday, as they discussed their dreams, Allick pulled up a text message Carolina sent him a year or so ago, that he continues to keep stored in his phone. It was a quote from the boxer Muhammad Ali: “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them — a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill, and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”