By CHRIS COOK
LongwoodLancers.com
Lorenzo Phillips may never be a household name. Shabooty, on the other hand, has a nice ring to it.
Born Lorenzo but better known by his childhood nickname, Longwood's new point guard has become a spark plug for the new-look Lancers this season. At 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, he plays the game with a passion, energy and infectious competitiveness that is perfectly suited for Longwood's new up-tempo, run-and-gun style offense and has propelled the Lancers to a 6-3 record under first-year head coach
Griff Aldrich.
Phillips plays the game that way because it's the least he can do for a sport that has literally changed his life.
"I feel like basketball and my family is all I've got," he said. "I don't know where I would be if I didn't play basketball."
In a life riddled with uncertainty and instability growing up in Houston, Texas, basketball has been Phillips' North Star. It's where he's turned when everything else has gone awry, the one aspect of his life that has remained consistent regardless of the circumstances and challenges he has faced since childhood.
Basketball is what pulled him out of the "Third Ward" in Houston, known to be one of the toughest areas in the city. It's what brought him to Longwood where he reunited with his former AAU coach
Griff Aldrich, a man and mentor he has known for nearly a decade. It's what has Phillips just a few semesters away from becoming the first member of his family to earn a college degree.
Phillips has been a boon to Longwood basketball since he arrived on campus. He leads the league in free throw percentage, ranks fourth in assist-to-turnover ratio and, at just 6-foot-1, ranks 10th in rebounding. Most importantly, he is driving the program's best start of the Division I era, helping push Longwood to numerous wins that have re-energized Longwood's fan base, including a five-point victory over Richmond on Nov. 9 that set the tone for Longwood's Cinderella start to 2018-19.
But the road Phillips has taken to Longwood is far from straight and narrow. He has had to step over, and sometimes fallen into, pitfalls that would have derailed the dreams of many with lower ambition or a lesser love for the game. However, it's that passion that has made Phillips a case study in how the value of sports transcends the boundaries of any given playing surface and, in turn, has kept Phillips from straying too far from the path that brought him to Longwood.
"When I was young, I would get into stuff and was always in trouble. I was a bad child," he said. "But as I got older, I realized that basketball was a great thing for me because it kept me focused and out of trouble. When bad things were going on around the neighborhood, I was in the gym."
There were bad things aplenty where Phillips grew up. The well-documented crime and poverty that plagued his neighborhood presented him with a daily gauntlet of distractions and temptations at a young age. His parents separated when he was seven, and in lieu of a stable home, he bounced from house to house, crashing on the couches of friends and extended family. He often walked the streets in the wee hours of the morning and hauled his dirty clothes around in buckets in case a friend's family would allow him use of their washer.
He watched his peers succumb to the nefarious influences of their surroundings and, tragically, he endured an eye-opening loss at a young age when longtime friends and teammates Melvin Swift and Daquarius Tucker were shot and killed within a two-year span.
But it was also in Houston where Phillips found his North Star. The court became sacred ground for him, whether that was neighborhood playgrounds where he first began to make his name, The Forge ministry where he met Aldrich, the famous Fonde Center where he played pickup ball against pros and future pros, or on his high school home court at Jack Yates High School where he helped the Texas powerhouse to a pair of state championships from 2013-16.
At each of those stops, the game of basketball provided Phillips plenty of opportunities for self-discovery and personal growth, but even more so did the people who came with it. Aldrich was among those, but there were many others.
There was the brother of a childhood friend who told Phillips that if he got nothing else out of his natural basketball talents, to get a degree.
There was Rafer Alston, an NBA veteran better known as "Skip to My Lou," who taught Phillips – then an undersized shooting guard – how to play the point.
There were the Cousinards, a highly regarded Houston basketball family also coached by Aldrich who took Phillips in as one of their own. Phillips worked out extensively with the eldest Couisnard, P.J., who enjoyed a successful career at Wichita State and first met Phillips during a trip home between seasons as a pro player overseas.
P.J. and Phillips connected especially well, with P.J. serving as a living, breathing example of how a person in Phillips' circumstances could use basketball as a vehicle to escape hard times.
"I would always tell him a bit of my story every time we talked to give him hope and a vision of making it out of the hood with a basketball," Couisnard said.
"With P.J., we trained so hard together," Phillips said. "He would always tell me, 'You want to get out of the hood? You gotta go through rough times and rough training.'"
And then there was Aldrich.
Phillips and Aldrich first connected through The Forge, which was the parent organization for Aldrich's HIS Hoops AAU team that he founded during his time as an attorney and high-level executive in the oil and gas industry. HIS Hoops was strategically located in the Third Ward and operated under the mission of using basketball as a vehicle to encourage personal and spiritual growth in the area's at-risk youth.
Phillips came to HIS Hoops with a profile typical of many of the organization's participants: Supremely talented and from humble beginnings, but beset by challenging life circumstances. However, contrary to how many had treated Phillips to that point in his life, Aldrich refused to let the young standout's basketball talents act as blinders to the other areas in his life where he was falling short. He saw Phillips' shortcomings in the classroom, his often truculent demeanor, and his resistance to authority, and coached him in those areas as well.
Aldrich treated Phillips like the scores of others that came through the HIS Hoops program – held to a higher standard in all areas of life, regardless of basketball ability or external influences surrounding them. Early on, Phillips was combative, resistant and downright defiant within that structure and in response to Aldrich's emphasis on things non-basketball. In his words, he just wanted to hoop.
And while Phillips had the option – and perhaps too much adolescent freedom – to leave the program any time he chose, the pull of the game ultimately proved stronger than the pull of the other influences in his life.
"I used to kick him out of practice," Aldrich said. "But he'd just come back. He'd always come back."
Aldrich rode Phillips harder than any coach ever had. He saw the circumstances Phillips and his other players went home to, but he refused to let that be Phillips' crutch. Basketball under Aldrich became not only home for Phillips, but an environment that was equal parts safe haven, classroom and proving ground.
"The first time around was difficult," Phillips said of his early days with Aldrich. "He always wanted me to do the right thing. Every day he would tell me, 'You gotta do better, you gotta do better.' After every practice he would give us a talk or devotional. When I was young I didn't understand, I just wanted to go and have fun with my buddies. He always held the bar high and always taught us excellence from the time I was young. He still tells us that today, that he's going to hold the bar high for us no matter what."
Aldrich was the voice Phillips needed at that point in his life. He was that voice for many, a fact he reminded himself of every day both as the de facto chauffer for many of his players and an intentional resident of Houston's inner city himself.
As a result, Aldrich and his wife, Julie, often opened their own home and hosted players like Phillips and his teammates. Phillips was there when Griff and Julie adopted their first son, Scott, and later their second son, Ford. He has been around for the better part of both of those two younger Aldrich's lives, and the entirety of their third child's, Laura Lee, now four. Aldrich still has a picture on his phone of a young Phillips with Scott, an early snapshot of the player who has now become a favorite of all three Aldrich children.
Phillips' AAU days under Aldrich ended after 10th grade when his abilities earned him invitations to more high-profile AAU programs, but the two still remained close. Aldrich coached several of Phillips' Jack Yates High School teammates and would work out Phillips with that group frequently after practice.
Phillips turned into a star at Jack Yates and began to attract the attention of college basketball programs. He led Yates to two Texas Class 3A State Championships and stole the spotlight several times while doing so. As a freshman, he set a Texas state record by hitting nine three-pointers in the state semifinal game and averaged double-digit scoring all four years of high school.
But after years of doing what he called "my own thing," Phillips was due to suffer the consequences. He fielded interest from a number of Division I schools as a junior, but that interest dried up when recruiters realized his grades weren't sufficient for NCAA admissions standards. Instead, Phillips was forced to defer his Division I dreams and enroll at Trinity Valley Community College, a powerhouse junior college program in Texas but a far cry from the higher-profile programs who once wanted him for their own.
Phillips excelled at Trinity Valley in his two seasons, but again, his skills on the court were never in doubt. It was everything else that was holding him from reaching the next level of his basketball career.
That's where the positive influences who entered Phillips' life through basketball began to take hold: The encouragement from his elders to get his degree, the inspirational wisdom of Alston and the Couisnards, the words of a middle school coach who once cut him as a seventh-grader for behavior issues, and the seeds Aldrich planted so many years before.
"I realized I could lose basketball because I wasn't focused, or I wasn't applying myself in school. That's when I decided to change my life. Basketball helped keep me moving in the right direction."
Aldrich, by that time in the midst of restarting his career as a college basketball coach on Ryan Odom's staff at UMBC, remained an ever-present influence on his former pupil. The two spoke frequently, with Aldrich staying on Phillips about his grades despite him not being on UMBC's recruiting radar. The conversations between the two weren't recruiter-to-recruit, but mentor-to-mentee.
That is until Aldrich was hired as Longwood's head coach near the end of Phillips' second season at Trinity Valley in March of 2018 and encountered a much different Shabooty.
"When I got here, I asked Shabooty about his grades and he had a 3.5 GPA," Aldrich said. "Then as we started to dig a little more, we started to say, 'Okay, he can do the work and be successful here.' I had been away from him for a while and knew him in a different light where he wasn't as mature. I knew he wasn't going to be successful here if he wasn't focused, so the more I visited with him, the more I learned how serious he was, and how much he'd grown up. I talked to the Couisnards back in Texas and learned that transformation had gone on back home, too.
"The more I was around him, the more I said 'He does seem different.'"
The sport that kept Phillips out of trouble back home had evolved into a motivator in the classroom and a catalyst for his newfound maturity. He had already seen how neglecting those two areas would strip of him of opportunities on the court, and he says he wasn't going to miss out on a second chance.
That chance came from Longwood, and Phillips jumped on it as one of the first of Longwood's eventual seven newcomers to commit to Aldrich. Through the first nine games of the season, Phillips has risen to the top as the most impactful of that crop and has paired with veteran guard
Isaiah Walton and fellow newcomer Seán Flood to give Longwood one of the most dangerous backcourts in the Big South.
"He could have gone to a higher level," Aldrich said. "But he knew if he came here, we would take care of him and make sure he stayed on the right track to get his degree. Our recruiting pitch to him was less a sell on the school and more about if he came here, I was going to be on him, I wasn't going to play around, and ultimately that we would make sure he'd be ok and succeed here."
Aldrich told Phillips that the same bar he set for him many years earlier would be set and waiting for him in Farmville. Phillips made the decision for himself to meet it. Now there is a GPA minimum he must maintain. There are classes, team meetings and daily study halls he must arrive on time to, and be engaged in. There are team activities and service projects he must take part in, just as is expected of his 14 teammates.
And then there's basketball, which, to no one's surprise, Phillips has acclimated to seamlessly. He leads Longwood with 32.0 minutes per game and enters Friday's matchup against Frostburg State with back-to-back 20-point games, including a heroic 23-point, 11-rebound effort in a 65-45 rout of offensive powerhouse VMI this past Saturday.
"From a team perspective, he fits in so well," Aldrich said. "He's very well-liked across the board. He's got a magnetic personality. He's been liked by all stripes at in the Third Ward, at Trinity Valley and here. His personality really helps, and secondly, he loves the game. He loves it, loves it, loves it. So he brings a level of commitment to personal growth on the court that's something we want all our players to have."
According to Couisnard the arc of Phillips' life, and the role basketball and its accompanying mentors have played in it, has served as an inspiration to similarly at-risk youth back home in the Third Ward and to the greater Houston community as a whole.
"Shabooty has become a voice for the community and the city," Couisnard said. "He can go into any rough neighborhood in the city of Houston and get a pass. The city of Houston is totally behind him because once he realized he had a chance, he matured and he's been a hard worker ever since. He's the true definition of inspiration to kids that have tough home situations, and he's lost so many friends and teammates along the way he constantly tries to live for them."
Now as the Lancers embark on the final stretch of their non-conference schedule, Phillips has added yet another chapter to his journey by becoming a keystone to the Longwood's continued success in Aldrich's first season. Longwood's fans are beginning to learn his name, just as all those who have come across Phillips before, be it in pickup games on the blacktop or in state championship games in basketball-rich Texas.
Now that the Lancers are 6-3 and off to the program's best start of the Division I era, it may not be long before Longwood, and Shabooty, become household names.
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