Hard work, consistent play leads Miles MacPherson to score over 1,000 points in four-year varsity career
By Kyle Foster, photo courtesy of Eric Thompson (Shamboozled.com)
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One sign of a player who had a good career is their work ethic. Oftentimes, a good work ethic will lead a player to do some good things.
All of this led Vintage senior Miles MacPherson to score 1,000 points in his four year varsity career.
MacPherson was always looking to get shots up and was also a hard worker in the weight room, which helped him with this feat.
“I definitely started working harder as I was getting older,” MacPherson said of his work eithic. “(The) team started to recognize me more. I had to put in more work to become a better player because (in) every game, the best defender was on me. I just needed to elevate my game, get stronger, and just get better at everything.”
The accomplishment is something even more impressive because it’s been a while since it’s been done. On top of that, Vintage head coach Ben Gongora has had some talented players come through who haven’t been able to reach the monumental mark.
“I’m very proud of Miles,” Gongora said. “This is a testament to his hard work, his grit, his consistency. At the high school level, in these parts, in this area, kids aren’t scoring 1,000 points in a season. Very few are scoring 1,000 points in two seasons. The fact that Miles was able to get four years of Varsity experience, and as I said, continue to produce even while it got more difficult to do so because he’s garnering more attention on the defensive end is really a testament to Miles. It really is. We had very little to do with this and I say we the coaching staff, would draw up some things, and Miles would just go execute.”
MacPherson reached the 1,000-point mark in the final game of the regular season at Casa Grande when he hit a 3-pointer to reach the milestone. He had an idea he was getting close after his dad, Joe, was keeping track.
“To be honest, I forgot that I was even going for it,” MacPherson explained. “I was kind of just inching my way there. But then I guess my dad was keeping my stats over the time being so he told me that I was pretty close. I was like ‘Okay, I mean that’s cool.’ But I still just played my game and I did what I usually do and I hit it.”
Overall in his four-year varsity career, he finished with 1,025 points. He did this while teams also keyed in on him defensively, which makes it harder to score.
“Miles garnered the most attention of anybody on the team,” Gongora pointed out. “The other team is scheming for him to shut him down, which is why 1000 points is so impressive. Because the better Miles got in his career here at Vintage, the more difficult it was for him to score because the defenses would key on him even more. So in a way, he was the victim of his own success, if you will. So what Miles had to start doing was not force it so much.”
Like every player, it is a long journey to get to this point. For MacPherson, it started by spending his first two seasons at Napa High.
His freshman year was when the season ran from March to May due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which pushed sports back to seasons they weren’t meant to be in.
“There was a lot of adversity that we had to fight through as a team,” MacPherson said of the odd freshman season he endured. “I mean, it was definitely different. But we were just happy to be playing basketball. I mean, we just put everything we had out there. Still, it was definitely a lot different, but it was still fun and we were still able to do our thing with the limited season that we had.”
This season, there was more adversity as they ran low on numbers for various reasons, making it hard to even scrimmage in practice.
“We had our ups and downs, like as a team on the basketball court, but I think always like as a family, we were really connected,” MacPherson added. “We really had a good time just being with each other. Like every practice, we wanted to get better and everything we did outside of basketball, we were just really close. And we just connected so well as a team that tried to kind of transfer it to the basketball court later in the season.”
In those times, MacPherson was always there and reliable for the team.
“These kids did not sign up for this year,” Gongora pointed out. “To first lose your big man due to an ACL. We had another player, sophomore talented player who was a rising star, lost eight weeks of the season with a broken hand. At the result of a teammate who broke his hand. Had another teammate, basically a broken and a scrum for a loose ball. We had another kid his season got cut short due to health issues, illness, you know, the last two and a half weeks. So it was a lot and all the while, Miles showed up every day.”
The sophomore season was the first season back when many things weren’t back to normal yet. In his first two seasons of varsity basketball, wins were hard to come by as well.
But as a junior, he decided the time was right to transfer down the street to the second-most winning program since the Vine Valley Athletic League’s inception. At Vintage, the fit was like a glove as he could fit in without issue.
“He embraced the culture here,” Gongora said. “For me the the program that we have here, the basketball program is just one big family. We truly are family. It’s not something we talk about. We live it, we do it. We spend a lot of time together a lot of time together, and they become close.”
During that season, MacPherson only got better as it went on. The highlight came when he scored 26 points in the Big Game. This was the first time we saw how good he could be in a Crushers uniform. We also saw the ability to score come with ease in this game.
Speaking of Big Game, he also was 3-1 in that mark.
However, MacPherson was one of the most consistent players in the league as well. You always had an idea of what you would get from him on any given night.
As a junior, he averaged 13.6 points per game and 5.3 rebounds a game.
Then as a senior, the numbers were nearly the same. In his final season, he averaged 13.4 points per game to go along with 5.3 rebounds per game once again.
He was also a lot more comfortable as a senior, which was something that was very noticeable on a nightly basis.
“I think Miles got a little more comfortable,” Gongora said of the difference from his junior to senior seasons. “You know, Miles is not a rah-rah guy. I am. I’m very animated and I am who I am and I love it when players are reserved. I want them to be themselves and I always want them to be true to their personality. So I never tried to get Miles to be something he isn’t and I think he just got more comfortable with things, not that he was necessarily uncomfortable. But it was everything with the system with the style, also becoming a better basketball player in terms of and we practice on this a lot decision-making.”
This was something that was showcased over his last two seasons at Vintage, where he was asked to improve his defensive skills as well. By the end of his senior season, he was a solid defensive player.
“If there was an adjustment, if there was a struggle or growing pains for Miles, it was having a coach who emphasized defense as much as I have,” Gongora explained. “I don’t know if Miles had that till now. So I didn’t necessarily let Miles get away with things on the defensive end, simply because he was scoring on the offensive end and Miles has improved as a defender. Our schemes are complicated. They are not simple. We spend a lot of minutes (on). So this was something that Miles had to make adjustments to and he did become a much better defender. I think he became a student of the game or learned how to incorporate the word and on defense. Man and ball. Help and recover. Those are really important things on the defensive side. Miles’s rotations improved. But there were growing pains.”
Vintage gave him a chance to grow his game on defense as well.
“I’ve never been the number one defensive guy,” MacPherson added. “I felt like I’ve been able to grow a lot here at Vintage.”
He was also voted as the Crushers MVP for his senior season. To go along with that, he was second-team all-VVAL. As a junior, he was an honorable mention for the league. He was also an honorable mention as a sophomore.
The senior was also the catalyst for the offense over the final three weeks of the season when the Crushers got hot. Over the final few weeks, he made the perfect decisions to open up the offense to its true potential.
“I had some great teammates,” MacPherson said. “If the other team was kind of on me, or if they’re open of course, I’m gonna hit him. Everyone gets to score and everyone gets to do their thing. The offense just opened up and everyone got to do their thing and that’s how we started winning games at the end of the season.”
MacPherson also hopes to continue his career by playing basketball at the next level after graduating in June.
