Best Team Leaders From Bishop McGuinness Classic

<p>The best players from each team get the most recognition when throwing out accolades, but the team leaders rarely get recognized. Often, the leader happens to be the best player. On occasion, the leader of the team may be a role player.</p> <p>After sitting through the ever-entertaining Bishop McGuinness Classic, there were a handful of guys that showed exemplary leadership qualities, and one isn’t even an upper-classman.</p> <p><strong>[player_tooltip player_id="745355" first="Sean" last="Pedulla"], Edmond Memorial, 2021.</strong></p> <p>Pedulla is the No. 2 recruit in Oklahoma and is headed to Virginia Tech next season. Instead of looking ahead to his college career, he’s taken a more significant leadership role than he held last season with his Bulldogs. In the McGuinness Classic, he wasn’t his scoring self, but he showed that he can lead his team through adversity (their loss in the semifinals) and still prevail over an athletic and talented Del City squad in the third-place game.</p> <p><strong>Raul Nuñez, Choctaw, 2021.</strong></p> <p>Nuñez isn’t the No. 1 option on Choctaw’s team. In fact, he may be the third option, but he’s the engine that keeps that team running on the court. The Yellowjackets have a spectacular coaching staff led by Jermaine Simpson, but Nuñez is the motivating voice for Choctaw in-between the baselines and one of the biggest reasons why Choctaw made it to the tournament final.</p> <p><strong>Chiante Tramble, Norman, 2024.</strong></p> <p>Tramble is the biggest surprise on this list because Norman didn’t play particularly well in the tournament, and because of the obvious: he’s a freshman. However, age has nothing to do with leadership, and watching Norman’s first-round game when they got trounced by Edmond Memorial it was clear that Norman has a lot of things to look forward to with Tramble. As a freshman, he spoke optimistically in timeouts and on the court with spoken affirmations like "we’re taking the right shots, they’ll start falling," and "let’s keep our intensity on defense, we’re doing the right things."</p> <p>Tramble warrants respect and is a name we’ll become very familiar with over the next three seasons.</p> <p><strong>[player_tooltip player_id="1015847" first="Sam" last="Battle"], Del City, 2021.</strong></p> <p>Deer Creek was the underdog through most of the tournament and didn’t win a game. They’re currently not ranked in 6A’s top 20, and they have a challenging schedule ahead of them. Those things aren’t stopping [player_tooltip player_id="1015847" first="Sam" last="Battle"] from being Deer Creek’s leader both in his skill and vocally. Battle has an easy-going, unbothered demeanor. He never seems too rattled, and that’s the behavior that the rest of the team echoed. No matter which direction the game went in, Deer Creek stayed competitive because they didn’t panic. That’s thanks to Battle.</p>