Peeking in on revival of Warrior Classic basketball tournament
Published: October 7, 2012
With Pacificwide invitational and open tournaments on the decline, it was good to see the Warrior Classic return after a 3-year hiatus to the Samurai Fitness & Sports Center on Yokota Air Base.
It welcomed six teams, three from out of area, in what amounts to a pre-season event before post-level action begins next month in Korea, and what few regular-season games involving teams in Japan take place each year. Osan Air Base, South Korea; Andersen Air Force Base, Guam (which plays in downtown leagues); and Misawa Air Base, Camp Fuji, Camp Zama and host Yokota took part in the 5-day event.
It’s one of just three such Pacificwide tournaments left on the calendar, assuming that the scuttlebutt about the Okinawa Martin Luther King invitational has been called off since the Foster Field House remains without power due to a typhoon. Besides the Warrior Classic, only the Osan Pacificwide Holiday and Guam March Madness tournaments remain on the docket. None of the services to regional tryout camp qualifiers any more, now that the Marines did away with theirs a year ago.
And that’s a shame. I was chatting this afternoon with Gerry Barnes, the longtime Pacific Air Forces resident as a civilian and GI and coach of the Andersen Bombers. He’s a longtime advocate of somehow keeping alive the so-called “elite programs for elite athletes” who come into the service out of college or service academies and hope to someday make it to an All-Armed Forces tournament.
Tournaments such as the Warrior Classic help players such as Osan’s Marlon George (Rust College, NCAA Division III, Holly Springs, Miss.), Jay Hall (Schreiner University, D-III, Kerrville, Texas) and Marlow Smith (Wallace College, Hanceville, Ala.) keep their game polished while they navigate the paperwork trail toward a berth in the All-Air Force camp.
Without such tournaments, how in the world can the military expect to continue supporting that $1.75 billion taxpayer-funded industry known as All-Armed Forces sports
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Barnes is one of two elder-statesmen coaches in the tournament, along with his Osan rival and longtime friend Tony Jones. They’re a couple of ancient pelicans with more years on the bench than they’d care to remember, but they’ve had a good time and won plenty of hardware along the way:
-- Jones, who works for the Defense Commissary Agency at Osan, has coached the Defenders for 20 seasons, during which he’s won his own Osan tournament 10 times, March Madness four and the Warrior Classic and now-defunct Kadena Classic on Okinawa twice each. He left most of his pedigreed players back at Osan; they couldn’t be released from work for the tournament. In tow, Jones does have former Yokota Warrior Anthony Showers, who’s been to tryout camp once.
-- Barnes has been in PACAF since 1969, as a security forces specialist who retired as a senior master sergeant in 1993. During that span, he’s been far from the sedentary creature Jones is; Barnes has been stationed in Guam, Okinawa, the Philippines, Korea and Japan, in some places several times over. He’s won three PACAF tournament titles, in 1982 with the Korea All-Stars, with Roderick “Mobile” Edwards and Ed Jones; 1983 with the Korea All-Stars, including Henry Buchanan, who ended up at Nebraska as a walk-on; and 1986, again with Korea, with two-time PACAF tournament MVP Cristobol Stevenson. He’s also won March Madness four times, Osan three and Kadena three.
One player with Misawa played for both Jones and Barnes during the last decade. A.C. Wilson suited up for the Defenders in 2005-06 and for the Kadena Falcons in 2006-08. Johnnie Smith, also of Misawa, played alongside Wilson in Korea in 2005-06.
Tony Quarles isn’t quite the pedigreed coach that Jones and Barnes are, but he has a solid ballclub well in the hunt for the title and gets help from two former Yokota High School players.
Ricky Cabral has played guard for the Warriors for more than 10 years since he graduated in 2000, and is the son of former three-time All-Air Force guard Ric Cabral, now retired and living in North Carolina.
Myles Andrews, Class of 2011, was the MVP of the 2011 DODDS Japan basketball tournament on his home Yokota High School court.
And the Warriors have their own college product, Trevor Greentree, out of Division II North Greenville (S.C.) University.
