AREA TOURNEY PREVIEW: MA's Johnson intends to end high school career on good note
Chloe Johnson’s historic high school career may come to a close this week but not the way the Montgomery Academy senior intended. (Tim Gayle)
By TIM GAYLE
She wraps her right arm in a protective sleeve before every game, protecting a tender elbow that is, at best, badly bruised and, at worst, fractured. She hates the sleeve, she hates the ice pack after the game, she hates the feeling.
“I can’t be injured, not for my senior year,” Chloe Johnson says.
It never was supposed to play out like this. After six years of competing for a state championship every year, Johnson and a rebuilt Montgomery Academy team is playing the state’s best 3A team on Tuesday night just for the right to earn a trip to the state playoffs.
The Eagles entered the season with an average squad that had just two players, Johnson and Virginia Meachum, with any quality varsity minutes, a team that is the fourth seed among four teams and, barring any unforseen miracles, is one game away from the end of a .500 season when they face Prattville Christian Academy (30-0) on Tuesday night in the PCA gym.
“I’ve always been on a team where I had a ton of good players around me,” Johnson said. “I prepare each year the same, but this year it was just a little bit more trying to get my mental space right and how I’m going to have to compete and play and help my team out a little more than I did.”
It’s an odd feeling for a player that has spent her entire life as a coach on the court, a ball distributor who now must face the realization that the best hope for victory occurs when she doesn’t distribute the ball but drives to the basket herself.
“She knows that,” said her coach, Reg Mantooth. “But at the same time, there’s so much emphasis on her, she has to give up the ball sometimes when it’s two or more guarding her.”
Even then, Johnson understands that on a rebuilding team, a seventh-year starter often gets more accomplished by holding the ball instead of passing it to teammates.
“That’s how I’ve always been taught,” she said. “That’s the stressful part, too. When I get trapped now, I know I can’t just pick up the ball and throw it, I have to dribble out of the trap. I’ve been taught since I was 3 or 4, when you get trapped, pick up the ball, hold it tight and throw it (to a teammate). No. This year, it’s totally different.”
As a sixth grader, she was the most valuable player in the Alabama Independent School Association state tournament as the point guard that led perennial power Tuscaloosa Academy to the AAA state title. The following year, the Knights lost in the semifinals, but bounced back to win state championships when she was an eighth grader and a freshman, playing on teams that included Grace Pelphrey, daughter of then-Alabama assistant coach and former Kentucky great John Pelphrey, and Kelsie Curry, daughter of Alabama women’s basketball coach Kristy Curry.
Her father, MA athletic director and football coach Robert Johnson, got a job the next year at Lee-Scott Academy and Chloe walked into another championship setting, leading the Warriors to the AAA title and earning AISA Player of the Year honors in the process.
“One of my favorite seasons was at Lee-Scott,” she said. “I love Coach (Corye) Ivatt and all of them are great people. I came in and Mary Mykal Prewett was the point guard. You knew Mary Mykal Prewett was the point guard and they just accepted that I was there and let me in and we went and won state that year. That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of.”
Robert Johnson got the job at Montgomery Academy the following March. The toughest part of accepting the job was deciding Chloe’s future -- leave her at Lee-Scott or put her in her third school in three years? Her parents wanted her to make the decision. She had been in Tuscaloosa Academy all her life until her sophomore year, built great relationships at Lee-Scott and now she had to decide on another group of friends -- and her third basketball coach in three years.
She chose Montgomery Academy, where it just so happened a talented group of seniors would form the nucleus of a team that reached the 3A quarterfinals before getting upset by Prattville Christian.
“Last year was awesome,” she said. “This year is the same. It’s just a different type of team, different type of players that surround me. Every team is different, though. You just have to get to know every single person on your team. I think it’s been great. I don’t regret the choices that I make.”
But she knew her senior year would be different than any other. Watching her in warmups, you see a confident player shooting shots from NBA range.
“This summer, that was a big thing,” she said. “My dad was like, ‘I think you could shoot a little farther,’ so I kept going back and back and I’d make them, so I just kind of work on those now to see what my body can do and how I can get better.”
She rarely gets to shoot that NBA-range shots in a game because every team has a Chloe-based defensive scheme in mind when you play Montgomery Academy.
“They should,” St. James coach Katie Barton said. “She’s a 2,000-point player.”
Johnson reached that achievement in mid-January and will likely conclude her career just shy of 2,200 points, about 500 career points shy of Capital City Conference leaders Michelle Delongchamp of Catholic and Leslie Claybrook of St. James, two shooters from a different era whose primary role was to score points.
“That’s exciting,” Johnson said of the milestone. “I hit 1,000 in the ninth grade and I thought, ‘Wow, such an achievement.’ Now, getting 2,000, I’m just trying to keep going. I didn’t even know I was going to do it. At this point, I’m like just keep on pushing. That’s not the goal for me. The goal for me is for our team to get better.”
Johnson, unfortunately, has run out of time. No one else can pick up the scoring slack and opposing coaches understand that all too well, so they simply run waves of defenders at her to wear her down.
“That’s frustrating,” she admits. “It’s different this year. Last year, I had Leighton Robertson, Gabby Ramirez, Madi Caddell, all those people who could handle the ball with me. This year, it’s like me and Virginia. I’d do it, too, if I was (coaching) on the opposing side. It wears you down, but you’ve just got to fight through it mentally and physically and try to help your team out.”
The grind is difficult. It takes days to get over the mental and physical exertion, a luxury she doesn’t have.
“It would wear any person down,” Johnson said. “But, honestly, it’s going to help me at the next level. I don’t like it, I wish I didn’t have to go through it, but it’s something that’s going to help me and prepare me for the next level and hopefully make the next level easier.”
When she does wear down -- or on those rare occasions when she finds herself on the bench in foul trouble -- Johnson spends more of her energy shouting encouragement to the players on the floor and yelling instructions from the bench.
“She’s definitely the leader of our team,” Mantooth said. “Everybody respects her and she does a great job with that.”
Mantooth has seen Johnson from both sides of the floor, coaching against her when the player was at Tuscaloosa Academy and the coach was at Fort Dale Academy. He had accepted the job at Montgomery Academy when Johnson was still deciding between the Eagles or Lee-Scott. He’s thankful she chose Montgomery Academy.
“It’s been really good,” he said. “She’s a coach on the floor. She knows everything we’re trying to do. She was so good last year learning the team and not really having to score. And this year, she’s run the team and had to score and been good at that, too. It’s been a really good two years. I’m proud of her.”
Tuesday’s first-round area tournament game at Prattville Christian will require the best performance by the Eagles this season. Even then, it likely isn’t enough.
“It’s hard to think about, honestly,” Johnson said. “This year, it’s such a mental challenge. I physically prepare and mentally prepare myself that I have to go do this, I don’t have a choice. When PCA and Trinity are throwing double teams at me, what am I going to do? It’s stressful, but sometimes you’ve just got to do what you have to do.
Oh, and that nagging pain in her right elbow? This is not a time to be injured. It hurts “a little,” she said, “but I’m trying to work through it. I hope it’s just a bone bruise. I just continually hit it. For some reason, I always land on my elbow.”