Boys and Girls’ Antione Slaughter scored 17 points in the Kangaroos’ 61-56 loss to Lincoln. (Denis Gostev)
Rutgers-bound star Mike Taylor was elsewhere serving the start of an indefinite suspension, assistant coach Jeff Wiggins was at home after an incident with school safety officers and Boys & Girls was on the wrong end of the scoreboard.
Tuesday, Feb. 1 isn’t a day Boys & Girls, which fell to nemesis Lincoln, 61-56, at LIU in Brooklyn, would care to remember.
It began with the news Taylor had failed to his first-period class, which under principal Bernard Gassaway is a no-no for student-athletes. Point guard Antione Slaughter and sixth man Anthony Hemingway each missed seven games when they did the same. Taylor didn’t play Tuesday and coach Ruth Lovelace isn’t sure when she’ll have the newly-minted 1,000-point scorer back.
“I’m kind of disappointed in the kid, not the principal’s decision,” Lovelace said of Taylor. Slaughter led the Kangaroos (18-5), ranked first in the city by The Post, with 17 points in his place and Jeffland Neverson added 12. “You let down the team, let down the program. But he clearly knew. It’s not like it’s something he didn’t understand.”
Then, at around 5 p.m., Wiggins, a 41-year-old unpaid assistant coach who is a physical education teacher at Lafayette, got into an altercation with school safety officers when they wouldn’t let the Kangaroos into LIU after an hour waiting in the cold.
“If you have a game here, you know the team is coming, how do you have them stand outside for an hour?” Lovelace asked. “All that stuff should be in place. The Lincoln kids were inside, not making this a Lincoln-Boys High issue, but they were in.
The team was out in the cold and Wiggins wanted them to be let in. Soon, tempers flared as Wiggins and a school safety officer came to blows. Wiggins was handcuffed, given a summons and forced to leave the premises.
“It was uncalled for what happened,” said Wiggins, who will appear in court in April. “I think I caused for us not to win this game because of some nonsense. It was nonsense, how they did that.”
Lovelace added: “To me, I don’t know about the kids, at one point I didn’t want to play the game. I don’t like the way it was handled.”
Lastly was Boys & Girls’ second loss to Lincoln, which cost the Kangaroos a chance to win the Brooklyn AA regular-season crown and likely the top seed in the upcoming citywide playoffs. Taylor’s absence clearly was a factor, though the Kangaroos did lead 17-6 midway through the second quarter and fell short by just five points.
Taylor has earned the reputation as a big-game player. He won a JV title as a freshman and led Boys & Girls to its first city championship in 31 years last March. Down the stretch, when the Kangaroos struggled for good looks, they clearly could’ve used the sharpshooting senior.
“He’s the key to their team,” Lincoln guard Shaquille Stokes said. “Without him a lot of things change, he’s their man guy, their top scorer. They needed him out there, but he wasn’t.”
Nothing went according to plan on Tuesday for Boys & Girls.
