Benton Harbor senior Carlos "Scooby" Johnson was announced as the 40th Mr. Basketball winner in the state of Michigan on Monday.
He learned he had won late last week on a phone call with his head coach Corey Sterling.
"You got what one of your goals was," Sterling said to Scooby. "It's Mister Basketball."
"I was kind of speechless for a few seconds." Scooby said about the phone call.
He led Benton Harbor to the Breslin Center as freshman in 2017, but it was the next year that he may have cemented his legacy.
Scooby hit the game-winning three-point basket with 14 seconds left in overtime as the Tigers beat Grand Rapids Catholic Central, 65-64, to win the class B state championship.
"I think it helped a lot," Scooby said. "Maybe there was some coaches that didn't get that first year when they saw me in high school and the next year they seen it."
Perhaps his biggest accomplishment of this season came on February 1st at the Red Hawk Classic in Grand Rapids.
Scooby and his Tigers teammates beat defending division one state champion Ypsilanti Lincoln and the nations top-ranker player Emoni Bates.
"We just came prepared for it," Scooby said of the win against Lincoln. "We had lost to Flint Beecher, we weren't all the way prepared but we was going to get better so that game, the next on the hit list was Emoni Bates so we just locked in as a team and completed our goal which was just to win."
Sterling says he has believed Scooby could bring the Mr. Basketball award back to Benton Harbor since he saw him play in the fourth grade.
"I knew we had to make sure he stayed with us and be a student at Benton Harbor High School." Sterling said. "Once that became, he took care of business and he took us to the final four his freshman year, sophomore he won a state championship for us. If we get a chance to resume this year I think he will win another State Championship for us."
Each day it seems less likely that the season will resume, but Scooby still dreams of wearing that Benton Harbor uniform again.
"Yeah I'm still holding out," Scooby said. "Hopefully get to finish my journey.
His next journey will take him to Indianapolis to play at Butler University starting next fall.
