Chris VinelDaytona Beach News-Journal
DAYTONA BEACH — You can tell by their passes. The way Caden Keller finds Cole Brower in the corner without looking or Jonathan Powell zips the ball inside to a cutting Jacob Lohman.
“We all have a great connection,” Powell said.
It’s a bond spearheading the Father Lopez Green Wave’s current run. They beat St. Joseph Wednesday to move their record to 16-5 and extend their winning streak to six games. That represents their second-longest stretch of the season after opening the campaign with seven straight.
Already, Father Lopez has racked up its best win total since it went 18-9 in 2017-18.
“I knew we could be good with this group, too,” coach Brad Ridenour said.
There’s a story behind that.
COVID brought about an AAU team
After COVID-19 shut the country down in the spring of 2020, a group of dads got to talking. For the first time in years, their seventh-grade sons weren’t involved in sports. They couldn’t be, with schools going virtual and canceling seasons.
Then, the idea: Form an AAU basketball team.
One of the fathers, Chad Keller, was the easy choice as coach. Keller serves as an assistant men’s coach for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. But for the first time in decades, he wasn’t on the court. The pandemic shuttered college basketball.
The nucleus of the AAU squad hailed from Hinson Middle School, where kids like Caden Keller and Lohman played together. Brower and Keller had partnered together the longest, since fifth grade. They recruited some seventh-grade players from other schools to fill out the roster.
Within weeks, the OB Elite club was competing in tournaments in Orlando, Jacksonville and Daytona Beach. It continued like that for two years.
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Players attended different schools before coming back together
When the OB Elite players reached high school in 2021, they scattered. Brower, Keller and Powell jumped to DME Academy. Lohman went to Spruce Creek. Others attended Father Lopez, Seabreeze or drifted out of the area.
The separation didn’t last long, though.
By their sophom*ore year, most of them — including present starters Brower, Keller, Lohman and Powell — enrolled at Father Lopez. Ridenour knew what he was getting. He and Chad Keller were teammates at Flagler College.
Ridenour inserted Lohman and Powell into the starting lineup with three seniors last year. Caden Keller and Brower subbed in off the bench. The Green Wave finished 15-11.
“Last year, there were four sophom*ores, and we had a bunch of seniors,” Powell said. “It wasn’t really our team. But this year, it’s our team. It’s different.”
Father Lopez entered this season with 10 players on its roster. Nine are juniors, and six were members of the original OB Elite bunch. The lone senior, Ian White, provides a paint presence as the starting big man.
“They know each other — what they’re going to do,” Ridenour said. “So when we run stuff, you can see they’re reading off each other a lot easier than just bringing guys together.”
That was displayed immediately.
During the Green Wave’s seven-game heater to kick off the season, they knocked off bigger schools like Flagler Palm Coast, Matanzas and Seabreeze and defeated other winning squads like Cocoa Beach and Halifax.
They slumped in mid-December, dropping three in a row, but quickly rebounded. Their only losses since then came against Deltona and Astronaut in mid-January while Lohman missed time with an injury.
Offensively, the chemistry remains. Powell paces the Volusia-Flagler area in scoring with 25 points a game. He tallied a team-high 24 against St. Joseph. Brower contributed nine, and White had six.
“We know how each other moves on the court,” said Keller, the point guard. “They know, if I’m driving, where to go on the court, so I can find them.”
Ridenour has seen the biggest improvement in the past year on defense.
“Man-to-man, we play really good,” he said. “They talk to each other. I think sometimes because they’re so close they get into each other a little bit more than a normal team would. Sometimes, that’s good. Sometimes, that’s bad. They’re almost like brothers.”
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OB Elite still suits up together in the high school offseasons. Powell said almost the entire Father Lopez team has played AAU together at some point, including the entire starting five.
Aside from the senior White, the juniors can expect a lot more time together. They wrap up their regular season with a home contest against International Community Friday and then head into the District 4-3A Tournament.
As the second seed, they receive a first-round bye. They’ll battle the winner of Circle Christian-Taylor in the semifinals next Thursday and look to make a postseason run.
Then, they possess one last go-round next winter.
“It feels like I’m just playing with my guys, my brothers,” Brower said. “We’re like family.”
