Full-court connections were part of every Chino Hills High School game during the 2015-16 season. The Huskies, who had future Pelicans guard Lonzo Ball at point, his brothers, LiAngelo and LaMelo, on the wings, and Onyeka Okongwu and Eli Scott as big men, played run-and-gun basketball to the Nth degree.
In their first game, Scott watched Lonzo throw a no-look, overhead pass that gave him a good indication of how the season might go.
“He scooped it backward,” Scott said. “If you see a half court shot backwards, it was like that. It was right on the money in ‘Gelo’s hands.”
Chino Hills, which is located 40 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, won its first game 131-42. It was one of 18 times the Huskies broke the 100-point mark that season as they rolled to a 35-0 record and a California Open Division state championship.
In 2018, MaxPreps named them the eighth-best high school team since 2000. Their place in history should only look more favorable after this fall’s NBA draft. LaMelo, who played in Australia last season, and Okongwu, who was named First Team All-Pac-12 as a freshman at USC, are both projected to be top-10 picks.
"Nobody knew about Chino Hills," said Steve Baik, who coached at Chino Hills for nine years, including six as head coach. "Now it’s like an international phenomenon. We were so proud that we were able to do that. So proud that we were neighborhood kids. So proud that we were a public school and came from a no-name town. There were so many stories within. It’s just really, really cool. It should be a movie one day."
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Baik met the Ball family for the first time in the summer of 2009. Baik was an assistant then who was helping run Chino Hills’ summer basketball camp. Lonzo was going into sixth grade. Baik had him playing against the eighth-graders. When Lonzo thew a perfectly placed bounce pass the length of the court, the possibilities started pinging around in Baik’s head.
“In that moment, I realized that that kid had a chance to be in the NBA,” Baik said.
In Lonzo’s junior year, the Huskies lost in overtime in the California Division I state championship. Expectations were high for his final go-around at Chino Hills. LaMelo, 13 at the time, had been bumped up a grade so the Ball brothers could play one season together in high school.
Chino Hills’ game plan was simple: Force the ball to the sidelines, trap, force turnovers and convert opponents’ mistakes into easy baskets. The Huskies ran a 2-2-1 zone. Baik shifted Lonzo from the first line to the second line so he could grab rebounds and start the fastbreak by himself. Lonzo averaged 23.9 points, 11.5 assists and 11.3 rebounds. All five players in the starting lineup were capable passers.
“It was like a puzzle when all the pieces fit together perfectly,” said Scott, a 6-foot-6 forward who has a chance to latch on in the NBA after his senior season at Loyola Marymount. “We had a scorer, which was ‘Gelo. We had defenders, which was me and Onyeka. We had the head guy, which was Lonzo. ‘Melo was just a bonus.”
The Huskies had a style they weren’t going to deviate from. The results were hard to argue with. Early in the season, they beat Florida private school powerhouse Montverde, which had future Duke star and No. 3 overall pick R.J. Barrett on its roster. Yet some still criticized Chino Hills as gimmicky.
"Some people didn’t like their style,” said Eric Sondheimer, who covers high school sports for The Los Angeles Times. “They would run up scores. They would come down and shoot from 40 feet. They would throw the ball off the backboard for a dunk. Some people thought they were not really playing the game. ‘Lunch ball,’ they called it.”
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Chino Hills’ players were entertainers as much as they were basketball players. The Ball brothers, whose father, LaVar, was never bashful about hyping them up in the media, signed autographs after games.
Lines to get into the games would start forming four hours before tipoff. Students got out of school at 2:45 p.m. Sometimes, Scott would walk outside and see adults relaxing in lawn chairs to make sure they could get into that night's game. The crowds became so large, Sondheimer began leaving his home two hours prior to tipoff so he could get a parking spot.
“It felt like if we didn’t entertain that game, we lost,” Scott said. “If we would’ve had a game where we put up 80 points, didn’t have many dunks, it was a dog fight, we wouldn’t have the same aura after a game. It was like. ‘Ah, another win. Chalk it up to the books.’ And we’d go on to the next game.”
The Huskies were something new: Suburban, homegrown, public school kids who were unafraid of facing the elite private schools and inner-city powers.
“It was this idea that because we were from the suburbs, it was like, ‘Oh, they’re not coming down to L.A. and doing that,’” Scott said.
Baik said his biggest challenge was making sure Chino Hills didn’t take unnecessary chances. The Huskies ran few half-court plays. If they were forced to call something, a pick-and-roll between Lonzo and Okongwu was their bread and butter. For the most part, what they did was unscripted.
“When people think of what good basketball is, they have an idea in their mind,” Baik said. “They kind of portray what good basketball is to ‘Hoosiers.’ In a 'Hoosiers' type of offense, you’re going to really need to pass the ball so that the team could create a better shot opportunity. A higher percentage by screening and moving the ball side to side and finding an opening. For us, it was a waste of time to do that. We had an advantage at almost every position. Our strength was to play fast.”
In the state semifinals, Chino Hills spanked Mater Dei, which was coached by Gary McKnight, the winningest coach in California history, 102-54. In the championship, Chino Hills outscored De La Salle 42-20 in the second half as it won its first state title in school history.
The following year, Lonzo, who's now the Pelicans' starting point guard, went to UCLA. He starred there for one season before the Lakers took him No. 2 overall in 2017. In October, two other starters from Chino Hills’ 2015-16 team will likely join him as lottery picks. Depending on how Scott’s final year goes at Loyola Marymount, there could even be a fourth NBA player from Chino Hills' 2015-16 team.
To this day, the Balls, Okongwu and Scott communicate in a group text called “Real Brothers.” Scott said there's not a day goes by without someone sending a message. Together, they formed one of the most dominant high school teams ever. The farther away what they accomplished gets, the better it seems to look.
“If it was just gimmicky ball, we wouldn’t have beat the No. 1 team in the country (Montverde),” Scott said. “We went across the country and beat these prep schools, these kids who were big recruits. It would’ve been different if we were just beating these local teams. We were beating teams with three or four NBA guys just like we had.”
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