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Garden Set To Return Tonight

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By DAREK SHARP, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 23, 2008

PLANT CITY - Durant High's boys basketball team has looked the part of a group missing its star player. The Cougars lost the first four games without A.J. Garden.

And yet Durant head coach Jeff Shotwell had no hesitation in taking a rare step: He doubled Garden's suspension.

Garden was suspended one week by the Florida High School Athletics Association. But Shotwell thought it should be for a longer period of time.

"I know people probably think it's nuts to go without a player of his caliber, but the message is simple," Shotwell said. "If you can't show self-control on the basketball court, you probably can't in everyday life, either. And it runs deeper than self-control. It's about being a good teammate and a good friend and not letting one another down."

Garden, one of the leading scorers in Hillsborough County, is set to return tonight against East Bay.

The guard was ejected from a Jan. 5 loss to Blake High for throwing an opposing player to the floor. Such ejections warrant automatic one-week suspensions.

And Shotwell said that before the hard foul, there was an incident between Garden and a referee that "when I saw on tape I was embarrassed about."

At the time of his ejection, Garden was one point shy of the 1,000 mark for his career. His first basket tonight will take care of that.

The Cougars lost their first game without Garden by a point to Riverview and then lost to rival Plant City 52-38 before falling to Lakeland and Sarasota Riverview.

"We want to win games as much as anybody, but we are dealing with 14- to 18-year-old kids, and my priority is to help them be better human beings first," Shotwell said.

Garden was averaging 18.3 points per game with no other Cougar averaging double figures, though guard John Mitchell and forward Royce Rose were close.

Long before the added suspension, Shotwell's philosophy of teaching character was in place.

His team has done a lot of work in the community. It raised money to buy sports equipment to send to a unit stationed in Iraq; the equipment arrived there last week.

Once a month, the Cougars participate in a workshop called Success 101 at a local church. Various motivational speakers are brought in.

With the help of many of the players' fathers, Success 101 raised almost $1,000 in four days during the holiday season.

The basketball team bought toys and delivered them to a children's hospital.

"The compassion on our players' faces at the hospital was one of the best things I've seen in my life," Shotwell said, adding that it was the parents' idea to start the workshop.

Last summer, the team helped feed and clothe the homeless every Wednesday night in downtown Tampa.

Reporter Darek Sharp can be reached at dsharp@tampatrib .com.

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